Column | What Trump's emerging foreign policy team tells us about his agenda

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

59% : Trump also seems to value sharp elbows.
54% : Trump also announced Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York) as his pick for the high-profile role of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; John Ratcliffe, a former director of national intelligence under Trump, as the next head of the Central Intelligence Agency; and former veteran and Fox News broadcaster Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.
52% : Showmanship is also a calling card for Hegseth, a photogenic Fox host who once led a group of veterans that called for extending the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and later used his perch on cable television to lobby Trump during his first term to stymie war crimes investigations into a handful of U.S. soldiers.
50% : This week, reports suggested Trump would tap two Florida Republicans -- Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Michael Waltz -- as secretary of state and White House national security adviser, respectively.
47% : "The picks may foreshadow the kind of clashes between Trump and his aides that dominated his first term in office when he sought to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and negotiate a nuclear arms deal with North Korea, moves that were ardently opposed by some of his more hawkish aides, such as national security adviser John Bolton and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis," my colleagues wrote.
45% : "But Trump has prioritized loyalty as a prerequisite for joining his administration, an attempt to stamp out challenges to his decisions.
41% : But he doesn't share the same squeamishness about battling Russia that some advocates of restraint in Washington do: If Putin doesn't enter talks with Trump over peace in Ukraine, Waltz wrote, then the United States should be rushing new weapons with fewer restrictions on their use to Kyiv to bring Russia to the table.
36% : In picking figures such as Marco Rubio and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for his administration, Trump may be signaling his foreign policy goals -- or foreshadowing four years of chaos.
33% : Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, my colleagues reported, "told Russian state TV journalist Pavel Zarubin earlier that Moscow was encouraged by Trump's campaign talk about seeking peace instead of confrontation with Russia, but he added that Trump was unpredictable and that it was not clear whether he would stick to his statements."
10% : Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have been bluntly skeptical about the need to support Ukraine's ongoing war effort, while many Republicans in Congress are more aligned with the Biden administration's project in buttressing NATO and Western efforts to back Kyiv.
9% : This may have been less a repudiation of their neoconservative hawkishness than a punishment for Haley, who ran a doomed primary challenge against Trump this cycle, and Pompeo, who flirted with a run of his own.
8% : His 2016 presidential primary challenge was batted aside by Trump, who mocked the senator as "lightweight" and "Lil' Marco."
1% : In his statement Tuesday evening announcing his pick, Trump hailed Ratcliffe for his efforts to debunk "fake Russian collusion" -- the allegations widely supported by the U.S. intelligence community that the Kremlin worked to spread disinformation to help Trump win the 2016 election.

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