Book Review: Michael Waltz, Donald Trump’s Incoming National Security Advisor

US President Donald Trump’s picked man for national security advice in general and “getting Ukraine ended” in particular – National Security Advisor Michael Waltz – will bring to the next White House foreign policy team a rare combination of solid wartime experience and years inside top-level Beltway decision-making.

But as Waltz’s semi-autobiographical book Warrior Diplomat: A Green Beret’s Battles from Washington to Afghanistan  (Potomac Books, November 2014) makes clear, even the best of America’s political-military elite tend to see the world as a place generally inferior to and not overly needed by the United States, and that especially goes for Europe. Ukraine, he doesn’t mention at all.

A native Floridian elected to Congress in 2020, Waltz, in 2022, backed US military support to Ukraine, but in 2024 he voted against it. A key theme of his book is opposition to open-ended US commitment to foreign wars without an end game.

Study at Virginia Military Institute (VMI), Waltz writes, was a formative, life-changing experience that taught him discipline, dedication to excellence, and respect for tradition.

Sometimes called “West Point of the South,”  VMI is one of the US’ oldest military educational institutions. Waltz’s majors were international business and international relations. Non-Americans suspecting Waltz is a “typical” US politician ignorant of geography and history would be mistaken.

The VMI curriculum is traditional, rigorous, and the academic standards are high, even though politically polemic at times – his book shows it.

The most famous VMI graduate, at least of the 20th century, is George C. Marshall, the US Chief of Staff credited as the organizer of America’s successful mobilization and victory by weight of material and industrial production in World War II.

After that conflict, Marshall became the architect in a massive American investment program that restarted the European economy and eventually made Europe the richest continent. Waltz, in a 2024 interview named Marshall as his “inspiration” for choosing to attend VMI.

Waltz studied abroad one year at the University of Valencia. He said he enjoyed the time and learned Spanish but, by 2024, he said his skill with that language “rusty.”

Following 1996 VMI graduation as a Distinguished Military Graduate – a distinction awarded for strong academic and training performance – Waltz commissioned as a US Army lieutenant, attended Airborne and Ranger school and served his obligatory four-year service commitment with an armored cavalry (tank) unit in Fort Stuart, Georgia.

During that tour he deployed, per his official biography, to the “Middle East,” probably as part of a US force presence in Kuwait in the latter 1990s.

Waltz following the Sept. 11 2001 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US, joined a National Guard special forces unit deployed to Uzbekistan. The main mission was supporting US commando teams fighting in Afghanistan. However, in the process, Waltz completed the special forces course, one of the toughest qualification schools in the US military, and became a wearer of the coveted green beret. 

This and good links inside DC led to a civilian job as a Pentagon advisor, first to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and later to Robert Gates. Waltz’s most rarified Beltway access, inside the White House, was as Vice President Dick Cheney’s Southeast Asia advisor.

Waltz saw his first combat in 2006, on a break from his DC job, as part of a green beret detachment deployed to central Afghanistan.

He later worked closely with commandoes from the United Arab Emirates who provided most of the field manpower, along with Afghan military operators. His book registers tactical successes taking out insurgent compounds and frustration with Taliban messaging and media operations outclassing America’s.

In 2009, US troops were killed and others wounded searching for a US deserter named Bo Bergdahl. Waltz’s teams were part of that search.

In the book, Waltz attacks the White House’s initial decision to, inaccurately, paint Bergdahl as a hero captured by the Taliban in combat.

He later takes the Pentagon to task for trying to annul desertion charges against Bergdahl, according to Waltz, because army leadership wanted the desertion scandal out of the news and didn’t want to hold Bergdahl’s chain of command responsible for the incompetent leadership of Bergdahl. That cover-up, Waltz writes, is exactly what is wrong with the US military.

Part of Waltz’s antagonism towards US military institutions, clearly, lies in hostility present in most professional armies between the “big military” mainstream tankers, artillerymen, and line infantrymen, and the (at least according to them) “elite” special operators and commandos.

Waltz recounts a confrontation taking place near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during which  Waltz, a green beret, watching Talban fighters from a hill, argued with a “Big Army” artillery colonel at a firebase a dozen or so kilometers away, about whether or not US shells might be fired at insurgents sneaking across the Pakistan border to launch mortar rounds at US and Afghan soldiers.

The colonel, with superior rank, eventually wins the dispute. The reader nevertheless is struck by Waltz’s ability to tell off a senior officer, over a radio network monitored by a lot of witnesses, in vigorous soldier language, and get away with it.

Most Ukrainian readers of Waltz’s book would point out that, from the colonel’s point of view, Waltz wasn’t just some obscure green beret major, but a man whose civilian job was advising the Secretary of Defense. Any run-of-the-mill artillery colonel would think twice before trying to prosecute a Beltway-connected guy like Waltz for insubordination.

Charitable Ukrainian war veterans might observe Waltz’s substantial and impressive professional experience both in and out of combat has been, nearly exclusively, one of counter-insurgency, narcotics interdiction, special operations, and low-to-medium intensity warfare.

Uncharitable Ukrainian frontline soldiers – particularly if in a bad mood or cold and wet – might even note that the Trump administration’s most seasoned war expert, although undoubtedly the legitimate recipient of medals for bravery in combat, has never faced a peer adversary in a conventional war. Some might add that until you’ve been under extended Russian artillery fire or suffered under glide bomb strikes, it’s not so easy to understand what works and doesn’t on a battlefield in the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Waltz’s accounts of war experiences are humble and the book often is thoughtful. In his view, per green beret doctrine, US military policy abroad cannot be effective unless the foreign soldiers and their mentality is understood.

He duly records Afghan (and indeed UAE and European) skepticism that US support for democracy in Afghanistan probably won’t last. He writes, honestly, that creating a battle-ready Afghan army would be the work of decades and politicians claiming otherwise (including at times, his own bosses) were lying.

Waltz records that the NATO troops that he worked with in Afghanistan – he names the Czech, French, Poles, and Dutch – were hogtied by rules of engagement preventing them from doing much but sit on their bases inside Afghanistan. He says US soldier skill sets were almost always better and US equipment and resources were overwhelmingly superior.

Probably the book’s best sound bite Waltz repeats from one of his green beret sergeants: “Sir, this makes no sense. Is our mission in Afghanistan to train the Afghans or the Europeans?”

The second best bit of writing, tied to absurd paperwork, haggling, and clearances needed for Waltz and his men actually to be allowed to attack the enemy,  might well be this: “My staff had derisively come to call our mission ‘counterbureaucracy’ rather than ‘counterinsurgency.’”

Although the book has not aged well from the point of view of insurgency-fighting (the US can win, the Karzai government can stand, the Taliban can’t maintain or gain popularity, the US voters can be convinced it’s all worth their tax money), its theme that America’s political leadership is spineless and that needs to change and become more muscular, might well have been written by Waltz’s new boss, Donald Trump. 

In recent statements, Waltz has suggested the US has serious leverage to bring Russia to the negotiating table to force a Ukraine ceasefire, and that a big piece of that could be agreeing with Saudi Arabia for a worldwide reduction in oil prices, which would crush the Russian economy.

After reading Waltz’s book, the reader more than anything else is left wondering, would Donald Trump take Michael Waltz’s hard-nosed, conventional, geo-politically solid advice on Ukraine and Russia? Or like the artillery colonel by the Pakistan border, just ignore it? 

This post was originally published on here