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I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battle Lines. It's Friday the 15th of November. A little over a week ago, American voters elected Donald Trump their next president. It was a decision that sent shockwaves around the world. His rhetoric on the campaign show had raised serious questions about his intentions towards unification.
Ukraine, the Middle East, China, even America's allies in Europe. But no one was quite sure what the specific contours of his foreign policy would be. Now he's been appointing members of his diplomatic and security cabinet, we're beginning to get an idea.
There are several key appointments he's made this week. Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, is to be Secretary of State, if approved. Mike Waltz, a former Green Beret and harsh China critic, is his nominee for National Security Advisor. Peter Hegseth, the Fox News host, is his appointee for Secretary of Defense. And Tulsi Gabbard, the controversial former congresswoman from Hawaii, is his nominee to become Director of National Intelligence.
Some of those appointments are more controversial than others, but it's safe to say that allies and enemies of the United States will be passing them carefully to work out what their intentions are and what Donald Trump's plans for the world may be. To discuss all this, I spoke to Tony Dyver, The Telegraph's US editor.
Tony, this is a series of appointments with really quite serious implications for, you know, the entire planet, for everybody mixed into Pax Americana, for, you know, adversaries, allies, the whole world, really. So let's dig into them. I really wanted to start...
Tulsi Gabbard, formerly a Democratic Congresswoman, now a Republican, and an incredibly controversial choice for this position of Director of National Intelligence, I think it is. And just to give listeners the context for this and why it's so important, this is the person who sits on top of all of the American intelligence agencies, the CIA, the NSA, the CIA,
I'm not even sure how many they've got. But this is the person who sits on top of all of that and is meant to coordinate them. It's the role that was introduced after September 11th. Who is she and why is this particular choice causing so much, and I'll be frank, alarm? Well,
Well, I think the reason for that, Rowland, is because she has some extremely unorthodox views about US foreign policy and US intelligence. So as you said, she was a Democratic congresswoman in Hawaii until 2020. She then left the Democratic Party and has since become a Republican. She was drawn to the Republican Party by Donald Trump after he received the nomination earlier this year. And she's become a sort of key Trump ally on the national security front, which is why we're interested in her today.
She has a track record of making a lot of extremely controversial statements about US foreign policy. Her overriding worldview, I think it's fair to say, is very anti-American intervention, very opposed to US involvement in wars in the Middle East.
And she's made some pretty serious claims about the war in Ukraine as well. In fact, on the day of the Ukrainian invasion, she said that the bloodshed that was going on in Ukraine would never have happened if the US and NATO hadn't taken on board Russia's legitimate security concerns, is the way that she described it, essentially saying that the US and allies giving some kind of guarantee to Ukraine on membership of NATO had prompted the war and
effectively justifying the invasion by Vladimir Putin. She's also expressed a lot of scepticism about reports of Assad's use of chemical weapons in Syria, which of course we know has been independently verified by the US and the UN and various other agencies.
She met Assad twice without the kind of consent of the US government, just sort of bilaterally in Syria. And she has been very critical of the role of the CIA and the other 17 US intelligence agencies in foreign policy around the world. So they've sort of put Fox among the chickens here by putting
putting her in as head of all of these agencies because she is a huge critic of the work that they do. And she's also said that she doesn't believe in what she describes as a Democrat-run foreign policy establishment in Washington. And she believes that they're all participating in a military industrial complex. And she wants to put a stop to that, the very establishment that she
has rejected, she now runs. So there's a huge concern, I think, from the intelligence community here in Washington and from some allies around the world about what exactly her appointment is
is going to mean if it is indeed confirmed by the Senate. I mean, it's remarkable stuff, isn't it? I mean, she's, you know, after the invasion of Ukraine, she posted a video on social media asserting the, quote, undeniable fact of biolabs funded by the US across Ukraine. And,
her defense is she didn't specify as the Russian disinformation had that these are biological weapons labs. But she's basically being accused by some critics of treason. And that's not my word. That is...
Traitorious, in fact, is the quotation being used from the sources MSNBC have been speaking to. I'm just trying to work out how CIA officers probably feel about this kind of appointment. How dramatic is this for them? The important thing to note is that in this role as DNI, I mean, there isn't a like,
Department of National Intelligence. This is a kind of oversight role that sits on top of all of those agencies. But she is the person who communicates the opinions of the intelligence community to Congress. And each year, the DNI is responsible for signing off on a report that basically summarizes the unclassified elements of what the US considers to be the major threats of
around the world and when that comes out each year it sort of goes through country by country it talks about Russia and China and North Korea and Iran and what the various agencies between them have managed to uncover so
put someone in that role who has expressed such scepticism about the previous conclusions of those agencies, I think we'll be raging a huge amount of alarm because the question will be how can we do that job without having someone who's in charge of those agencies who believes that the intelligence that we've
is accurate and can communicate that to Congress and to the wider public. How likely is it she'll actually be confirmed? And I ask that because we know now that the Republicans, you know, they're going to lock down the Senate, they're going to lock down the House of Representatives. But we have seen them rejecting supposedly Trump's desired candidate for majority leader.
um in the senate is it possible that that house republicans no matter how law they are to donald trump senate republicans uh for that matter might draw a line in the sand um somewhere with an appointment like this well yeah i think there is a possibility of that and some of these other appointments have been hugely controversial i mean
it's not relevant to our discussion necessarily, but Trump has also nominated Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. And he is the one really that people are most upset about in DC today. And there is an argument that he has deliberately nominated some of the most provocative people he can to some of these positions and
on the expectation that they will be rejected by the Senate. So when his second choice is then put forward, those will sail through the nomination process in the Senate, what is being called the Matt Gaetz false flag operation by Trump to kind of use these people as a lightning rod for the criticism of some moderate Republicans in the Senate. That argument more applies to Gaetz than it does to Gabbard. But I mean,
as we've said, there is a lot of controversy about her too. I think Trump's team had hoped that Rick Scott, who is a more Trump-aligned senator, was going to secure the majority leadership in the Senate. And actually, that didn't happen in the end of the secret ballot of senators Wednesday. They decided to elect John Thune instead, who is a
an ally of the previous majority leader Mitch McConnell, who has been quite critical of Trump. So it wasn't an ideal outcome. Although he did say after that vote that he was looking forward to working with Trump and he wanted to get some of these nominations through. I think what we're probably going to see now is a bit of horse trading between Trump's team and the Senate in an attempt to get as many of these people through as possible. I would say Gabbard is maybe the second most controversial one that he's appointed. And
If most of the opposition is directed towards Gates, then perhaps she'll get through or she could also be blocked. I mean, there's a lot of Senate Republicans, as you would expect, who are extremely well versed in intelligence matters and have spent a lot of time working on it. So they'll probably have something to say about it. Marco Rubio has been nominated for secretary of state. In other words, you know, the United States top diplomat, not the most outlandish pick. What else do we know about Rubio? Where does he come from and what do we think he's going to bring to the job?
Rubio's political background is in Florida. He was Speaker of the House in Florida and then became a Florida senator. He was in that role from 2011. So that was the job that he had in 2016, where his big run against Donald Trump came in the Republican primary. People will remember that at the time, Trump was pretty hostile towards him, as you would expect during a primary called Little Marco.
basically suggested that on foreign policy, Rubio was a war hawk who wanted to kind of involve the US in more of these conflicts around the world. I think it's fair to say that since then, since 2016, Rubio's views on foreign policy have changed. And he's addressed that directly in interviews. He said that the world has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, and he no longer thinks
thinks that the US should be this sort of liberal interventionist power and should instead be focusing on the domestic agenda of whoever the president of the day is. So basically, he's fallen in line with Trump's view on foreign policy. He does have an interesting history on Ukraine.
When the war first broke out in February 2022, he was very supportive. He said that the US should be involved in the conflict, should be offering humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine. But in the most recent round of budget negotiations between Biden and Congress over support for Ukraine, he did vote against that package, along with quite a few responses. And he has said that he thinks
The expense of the war from the US perspective has become too great. We now need to look at some kind of negotiated diplomatic solution between Putin and Zelensky. So that puts him basically in line with what Trump has said. There is an interesting video that emerged of him since his appointment.
which shows him in December last year confronting some pro-Palestine protesters who called on him to support ceasefire. And in response to them, he said that he didn't think there should be a ceasefire. The only terms of the ceasefire should be if Hamas was to completely surrender.
and he said that he thought that the civilian deaths and the deaths of children in Gaza since October 7th have been entirely the fault of Hamas. In other words, that Israel should be given carte blanche to continue to prosecute this war there. He said he wanted Israel to go after Hamas and destroy every member of Hamas that was there. So I think, fair to say, pretty hawkish on that topic, and basically in line with what President Trump has been saying on the campaign trail in the last few months. He's the guy who will obviously be...
doing what Secretary of State's do, flying around the world, spending a lot of time speaking to foreign governments, to other Secretaries of State, to other foreign ministers. What should they know about him? Is he easy to get along with? Is it going to be a big change of tone from the Antony Blinkens of this world? Well, I think Blinken kind of revived this kind of Kissinger era.
in the Middle East. I mean, Blinken has spent a lot of time on the road in the last 18 months and he's off in person in Qatar dealing with the negotiations. And I think we might expect to see Rubio take slightly less involvement in those discussions. I mean, he has been pretty clear that he wants the US to continue to support
or Israel. But I think the role of Blinken in these negotiations and in discussions with the Israelis has been to, while supporting a ceasefire hostage deal, to also urge caution in Tel Aviv and tell Netanyahu that he should
be more cautious about the war in Gaza to pump the brakes on occasions on the kind of military support that the US is providing. And I think the first indications we're getting from Rubio are that he will be much less willing to do that and leave some of these operational decisions to the Israelis, which could make a significant difference on the ground. But of course, he has only just been nominated, and we don't know exactly how his appointment is going to play out once he takes office. And clearly, you know, once he actually gets his feet under the table in the State Department and
receives advice from officials and sees the kind of intelligence briefings that these people have got then we might see a shift in policy but so far the indications have been that you know it will be a pretty big change from from the blinken era so let's go across town i suppose actually do you know what i'm i'm not actually very good on the geography of washington dc um maybe you can enlighten us so in relation to the state department where does the pentagon sit is it on the other side of town
We're going south, we're going over the river actually into Virginia is where the Pentagon is. So across the Potomac, we're looking at Pete Hegseth is Trump's nomination for Defence Secretary. He is a very interesting character. He's currently a Fox News host.
We know that Trump has got a tumultuous relationship with Fox News, shall we say, but he's also got a pretty distinguished military history. He served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He was in the National Guard and has his own record as a veteran. He's since then become defense commentator and news anchor and has written a book about
So he was a bit of a left field candidate. I think it's fair to say it actually reacts in Washington. I mean, some of the reporting that's come out about him with the reaction from defense industry and defense manufacturers is basically to say, God, who the hell is this guy? We had no expectation that this was going to happen or all of the kind of best laid plans for the Trump administration had been thrown into disarray by...
what appeared to be quite a random appointment of this guy. So we know a lot less about him, especially given the fact that he's not a politician and so hasn't commented on a lot of these issues previously than we do about someone like Rubio. It is quite remarkable, right, this guy. I mean, a lot of the comments we've been seeing from defence types, defence analysts, even reportedly some people close to the Trump campaign saying, I mean, you know, variations of the three letters WTF, WTF,
um about this guy and there was i think there was even one uh one trump campaign insider saying all the other picks were bang on the bullseye this guy wasn't even on the target what the hell is donald trump thinking how do you think he comes to a point where he where he picks basically a fox news host to run the military what do you think is running through trump's mind um when he picks this guy
Well, I think there's a few things. The first thing to say is that Trump has a massive scepticism towards the defence establishment and some of the top brass that are in there at the moment. And actually, there's another story which broke last night about the idea of Trump drafting an executive order to review the top generals who are in the Pentagon at the moment, trying to root out any wokery going on in the Pentagon. So I think
The idea of appointing an outsider who doesn't have the kind of top level military experience that some of the other candidates did is probably quite appealing to Trump. In terms of the way that he's making these decisions more broadly, though, I mean, he's holed up in Mar-a-Lago at the moment, surrounded by all of these advisors, but there's a lot of people coming and going. And we know that the way that Trump generally makes these kinds of decisions is he surrounds himself with a couple of top people that he's willing to listen to advice from all quarters, people that aren't officially part of the transition team,
people who are pretty fringe, frankly, in Washington politics. So some of these moments will come as a surprise because sometimes Trump just makes a quite, what's seemingly quite random decision based on the advice of someone that he's spoken to. And it can be quite difficult to read the tea leaves from the outside and work out what's going on. I mean, we also, there may be a more simple explanation, which is that Trump watches a lot of Fox News and he will have seen this guy exit on Fox
the TV every day talking about defence issues and he may have been persuaded by some of his arguments. What will be interesting is to see what other appointments are made in the Pentagon and whether or not there is a kind of establishment ring around Hegsett that is designed to absorb some of the more difficult legacy questions about the Pentagon that he wouldn't necessarily know about. But yeah, I don't think this is going to be the only surprise appointment that we get.
I just want, I'm sorry to harp on on this, but it's, um, it's just got a lot of traction before we move on to some others. Um,
One prominent US veteran, a guy called Paul Rykoff, who's on Twitter and runs Indie Vets for America, active in shorthand colloquialism, you could call the vet pro community. He wrote, I first met Higsworth when he started running Vets for Freedom around 2007. He's a highly effective and ferocious media culture and political warrior for MAGA and beyond loyal to and trusted by Trump.
I figured he'd probably pick him for chief of staff or press secretary, but this Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for secretary of defense in American history and the most overtly political. Is that a theme in these appointments? Do you think? I think it is a theme. I mean,
Certainly the major thing that we've seen is extreme loyalty to Trump and to the macro agenda is the most highly prized attribute in the people who are being appointed. And actually people that we've been talking to say that anyone who has expressed any disloyalty towards Trump since January the 6th or over January the 6th
in 2021 after the last election is out regardless of their qualifications, policy experience or otherwise. So that perhaps narrows down the list of potential candidates quite a lot. But yeah, I mean, it is typical that someone who was appointed to this domain, Lloyd Austin, of course, was a very senior commander in the Middle East and, you know,
spent a decade there making operational military decisions on the ground before he was given the senior job in the Pentagon. Pegs said while he has a veteran's experience, doesn't have that kind of background. And so, yeah, I mean, there's this huge alarm, I think it's fair to say, in the defense community and uncertainty about what exactly this means, both in terms of policy and in terms of the fact that the U.S. is currently involved in several major conflicts across the world. And having someone who really knows what they're doing is actually pretty important.
The other big hitter, of course, in White House foreign policy is national security advisement. Quite often these people are spoken about, you know, in the same breath as those other people as the kind of architects of American foreign policy. We can think about people like Condoleezza Rice, like Jay Sullivan, you know,
who for good or ill is said to have had a huge amount of influence on policy towards Ukraine, towards Israel. The guy who Donald Trump has picked is a former Green Beret called Mike Waltz. What does it say about the future of his foreign policy if this guy is going to be in charge of advising him on national security?
Well, we know quite a lot about Mike Wells because he's currently serving in Congress. So he's made a lot of statements about conflicts going on around the world. He is extremely hawks on China. I think it's fair to say he is one of the leading China hawks in Congress. And he's been extremely concerned about the impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative in parts of the world where there is not conflict and China's involvement in existing conflicts, including Ukraine and China's supply of military supplies to Russia.
I think you correctly characterise the importance of this role within the White House. It does depend slightly on how each administration functions because there is enough flex in the Constitution that different White Houses can be constructed in different ways on this issue. But Jake Sullivan has had a massive involvement in the way that the Biden administration has handled both Ukraine and Gaza. And if Trump chooses to go the same way, he is as important, potentially even more important than the Secretary of State, how decisions are made.
within the White House. He, like others that we've discussed, has been sceptical about aid for Ukraine as well, and that's a major theme that's emerging. One thing that I was quite interested by, given my obvious interest in the UK, Roland, is that he has also been very critical of the decision to hand the Chagos Islands back to Mauritius,
which of course was made by the new Labour government last month. When those negotiations started under Conservative government with James Cleverley as Foreign Secretary, he issued a statement and actually wrote to Antony Blinken about it and said that he was concerned that this Chagos deal was going to lead to an emboldened China in the Indo-Pacific. And he compared losing the Diego Garcia base, which is on
the Chagos Islands to the loss of a Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan during a withdrawal, which is, of course, we know has become a kind of totem for the Republican right and an example of how Biden has mishandled foreign policy. So I think we can potentially expect to see some kind of diplomatic friction with the UK over the Chagos decision as well, given that he's taken such interest in it.
That's interesting. I think also I read because, of course, he served in Afghanistan that he had said when the when the withdrawal took place, he thought that was probably going to be temporary, that eventually America was going to have to go back in there at some point.
So that's the kind of triumvirate on foreign policy. There's also been some very interesting, well, one particularly very interesting ambassadorial appointment, Tony. We know, of course, or I hope listeners know that in the United States, quite often, ambassadors are not career diplomats. It can be a kind of a political appointment. It could be all kinds of people end up as ambassadors in places.
Donald Trump has just nominated a new ambassador to Israel, a man with very strong views about that and potentially could be singling quite a dramatic shift in policy there. Could you tell us about him? Yes. So Trump's appointed Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, to be his ambassador.
Israeli ambassador. Huckabee is reasonably well known in the US political scene. He's also the father of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the current governor of Arkansas and Trump's former press secretary. So he's kind of within the MAGA orbit already. He is also a Baptist minister, and he's part of this perhaps slightly counterintuitive affinity between the Christian right and Israel. He's expressed very strong views, as you point out,
on Israel and their sovereignty over the region. That's a vague way of putting it, but to be specific, he said that he doesn't believe that the West Bank is a Palestinian territory. He said that they can't, in discussions about an occupation or settlements by Israel in the West Bank, he said there can't be any such thing as a settlement or an occupation because the West Bank is Israeli territory. He said that...
to question the sovereignty of Israel over the West Bank is like questioning the US sovereignty over Manhattan. So he takes an extremely strong line on this stuff. Now, of course, that will endear him to Netanyahu's government, which, as we know, is propped up by a coalition of
right-wing parties who perhaps agree with Huckabee on this issue, but it does, to go back to our discussion about Rubio, suggest that the US is likely to give Netanyahu a much longer leash on these issues, particularly when the Israeli ambassador is the one who is often making representations on behalf of the US government to the Israelis on the way they're prosecuting this war. I don't expect Maya Huckabee to be going in particularly hard on any Israeli officials or members of the Israeli government over this, given what he said previously.
the response in, in Israel amongst Netanyahu's allies is very positive, um, to this. Um, I'm just, I mean, the Haaretz, the, uh, the left-wing Israeli paper, they note that his appointment combined with prime minister Netanyahu's appointment of Yekiel Leiter as the next Israeli ambassador to the U S indicates that annexation could be at the forefront of any political agenda in coming months. Um, and that is a reference to the,
kind of long running project of acting on just that view you articulated about the West Bank that actually Israel should annex, if not all of it, then at least a portion of
of the occupied West Bank to Israel, which would obviously be a really dramatic departure from the status quo. But we were reporting, I think just a few weeks ago or so on, I think it emerged that they came very, very close to that deal during Trump's last tenure. Has anybody else
So is Trump spoken openly about, about annexation or that kind of thing? Trump doesn't get into this issue in any great detail on the campaign trail, but he has said that he thinks that Gaza could be turned into some kind of luxury resort where there would be some beautiful beachfront properties, which I think gives you some indication of how he views the question of Palestinian sovereignty over both Gaza and the West Bank. Uh,
I'm not aware of anything that he said specifically about West Bank annexation, but I think the kind of cautious line that the Biden administration has walked on this is not something that is going to exist beyond the 20th of January. Tony, Donald Trump has also made quite a forceful appointment to the United Nations. Tell us about his choice to become the new American ambassador there. Well, the only other appointment that I think does have some big diplomatic weight is Elise Stefanik.
She's a congresswoman from upstate New York who has been appointed as Trump's new UN ambassador or nominated as Trump's new UN ambassador. That was the job that was by Nikki Haley during the first Trump administration. And the thing that everyone is focusing on there, given the rows that have been had within the UN about the war in Gaza, is her huge support for Israel. She's very pro-Israel and she rose to fame in Washington partly due to the
rational hearings with heads of US universities that had pro-Palestine demonstrators. So that's her background. I think that just kind of adds to the wider hinterland that we've got here of a very pro-Israel foreign policy team. And in Lisa Farnick, a pretty argumentative and very robust group
Congress woman who will not be afraid to take the fights the UN as of when Trump sees fit And I think we'd like to see that pretty soon To finish then so let's flip this around and thinking about it not not from the point of view of Washington But but from other capitals Maybe let's start here in London since you know it very well, and and I guess most of our listeners who aren't American are probably British
You know, what does it mean for the British government? We've already got a big debate here about who should be the next ambassador to the United States. Who's the right person to deal with this? What do you think is the answer to that question? Well, we have seen some pretty strong statements from both Starmer and John Heathie in the last few days, which are to the effect of they will continue to make the argument for support for Ukraine, which is the number one priority for the British government.
and they will try and ensure that Europe reacts in a way which means that Ukraine remains supported throughout the rest of this year and next. I think basically it's trying to hedge against the possibility of a massive US withdrawal from various conflicts around the world, especially Ukraine. I don't think there has been anything in these appointments which would dispel the idea that Trump is going to reject US support for Ukraine in principle. I mean, there was...
a feeling, I think, a couple of weeks ago that, well, Trump might be saying all of this on the campaign trail. He might be talking it up on his rail and suggesting that he go for a deal with Putin, but he won't necessarily do that. We'll have to wait and see. Maybe it's just campaigning tactic. Maybe it's negotiating strategy.
I think the appointments these made were all people who agree with that view. I don't think there is anything that would make London sit up and think, oh, well, actually, it's all going to be okay. I think this is all pretty alarming stuff from London's point of view. But, of course, the UK government has the pleasure to work with whichever party
and office holders there are in the US and we'll now see a bit of horse trading, I suspect, behind closed doors as to what exactly the US is going to do and how the UK is going to both support and cautiously oppose the policy that comes out. Maybe for our British listeners, I mean, there is...
There's this weird debate about who should be the next our next ambassador. Our current ambassador, Karen Pierce, has been there for a while. And from what I hear on the kind of, you know, on the surrogate in the room with my little ground is that she's done a pretty good job and she's really made an effort to build bridges with with with Team Trump.
Do you think Keir Starmer will want to leave her in place now? And there are other names, David Miliband and Lord Mandelson are also said to be in the running for the Washington job. What do you think Keir Starmer's going to do?
Well, I think there's a very good argument for leaving Karen Pierce where she is. And you're right, she has done a very good job in getting in roads to the Trump camp, which is not necessarily particularly easy. I mean, back in 2016, we saw when Trump got in for the first time, the foreign officers bringing up Nigel Farage and asking him numbers for anybody who worked on the Trump transition team, because they were so disconnected from what he was doing. Actually, since then,
Karen Pierce has managed to build good relationships with Susie Wiles, who was Trump's campaign chair, now to be White House chief of staff. And she's managed to organise a dinner between David Cameron and Trump when Cameron was still foreign secretary, then a dinner with Starmer and Trump when Starmer was in New York for the UN recently. And Starmer did OK in terms of the kind of pop idol of who gets in first in foreign...
calling Trump after the election. Emmanuel Macron squeaks in ahead, but I think we are in the top five. But I think there is an argument for leaving. The counter argument from number 10's view is that appointing a US ambassador is a massive act of political patronage. And
what governments always do is reward their allies with this job because it's an amazing job, right? You get to live in a beautiful, like, bastard residence in Washington, D.C. One diplomat described to me as, like, Disneyland for diplomats. I mean, it's, like, where everyone wants to go. So there will be an argument in number 10 from the kind of domestic political point of view that appointing someone like Peter Mandelson...
would be a way of keeping him on side, perhaps rewarding him for his work with Labour during the campaign and keeping him quite close to the fold. It was put to me by someone quite in the know about this topic that Mandelson's
as a businessman. He ran this company, Global Council, which kind of offers political advice to governments around the world. He is a bit of a, seen as a kind of wheeler dealer. And that may give him some affinity with Trump. I mean, he's the kind of guy that Trump probably would quite like. Trump doesn't love career diplomats. Trump doesn't love the swamp, the establishment, or all the rest of it. But perhaps someone like Mandelson would appeal to him. But,
we won't know probably for a couple of weeks we'll have to see what happens. Tony Diver thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
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