Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) onstage July 16 at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. Melina Mara/The Washington Post

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to nominate Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and has asked Rep. Mike Waltz to be the White House national security adviser, people familiar with the matter said Monday, elevating two Florida Republicans with more hawkish foreign policy views than those of the incoming president, who ran on a platform of restoring peace to a war-torn world.

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, built his political identity on support for upending autocratic governments from Latin America to the Middle East to Asia, but he has softened his once-neoconservative worldviews in recent years on economics, immigration and foreign policy. He is vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and had been among those Trump considered to be his running mate before settling on Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, now the vice president-elect.

Waltz, a retired Special Forces officer who used to work for Vice President Dick Cheney, is one of the most vocal critics of China in Congress and previously advocated for an open-ended U.S. military commitment in Afghanistan. He has sat on a number of key national security committees in the House.

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. But Trump has prioritized loyalty as a prerequisite for joining his administration, an attempt to stamp out challenges to his decisions.

The developments capped a busy day of personnel news as Trump moves to fill key roles in his administration. The Washington Post reported earlier Monday that Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner and policy adviser during Trump’s first term, is expected to become a deputy chief of staff. Trump announced that Lee Zeldin, a former congressman from New York, would lead the Environmental Protection Agency and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), who chairs the House Republican Conference, would become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Despite their long-standing reputations as hawks, both Rubio, 53, and Waltz, 50, have tried to align their foreign policy views to Trump’s in some ways over the years, particularly on the conflict in Ukraine, which has become increasingly unpopular among Republicans as it grinds on as a costly war of attrition.

Rubio also has endorsed Trump’s wariness of military spending on Europe’s defense. “In the 21st century, Europe must take the lead in Europe. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are more than capable of managing their relationship with the nuclear-armed belligerent to their east,” Rubio wrote in the American Conservative last year. “But they’ll never take ownership so long as they can rely on America. If this were a welfare policy debate, conservatives would be calling for work requirements.”

If confirmed by the Senate as America’s top diplomat, Rubio would become the face of Trump’s foreign policy, crisscrossing the globe on a government plane to articulate the president-elect’s “America First” doctrine. Rubio’s ascent would also mark a dramatic evolution of his relationship with Trump, who once called him a “total lightweight who I wouldn’t hire to run one of my smaller companies – a highly overrated politician!” The senator visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Monday, said two people familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the transition.

Rubio has supported several pieces of legislation seeking to curb China’s political and economic power. In 2020, Beijing sanctioned Rubio along with 10 other U.S. citizens, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Beyond staking out a tough position on Beijing, Rubio also could steer Trump to taking an even more aggressive position on Hamas, the group that attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, setting off the year-old conflict in Gaza. Rubio has called the militants “vicious animals.” He has also called for investigations into federal officials who supported a cease-fire in Gaza, accusing them of insubordination.

Waltz had widely been seen as a contender for a senior national security position in the new Trump administration. He has been a forceful critic of President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, casting China as one of the biggest winners abroad during the past four years, blasting the White House for its handling of the fall of Afghanistan, questioning the open-ended nature of U.S. support for Ukraine and calling it “pathetic” that fewer than half of NATO allies meet defense spending goals set by the military alliance.

The national security adviser is a senior presidential aide who coordinates national security policy across the U.S. government, working with senior leaders in multiple agencies to do so. While the position is not in the president’s Cabinet and does not require Senate confirmation, it often comes with significant power.

A spokeswoman for Rubio did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Waltz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Waltz has been one of the most influential Republican voices on Capitol Hill in national security over the past few years, serving on the House committees overseeing the armed forces, intelligence and foreign affairs. He also served this summer on the task force investigating the apparent assassination attempts on Trump.

At the outset of the war in Ukraine, Waltz called for the Biden administration to provide a steady supply of weapons and explosives to Ukrainian forces so they could attack Russian supply lines. But he has increasingly adopted Trump’s rhetoric about the NATO military alliance that aids Ukraine, questioning why its member countries aren’t doing more to counter Russia and bolster their defenses.

In April, Waltz said during a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the “tyranny of low expectations” had infected the alliance and questioned the sustainability of the United States providing the majority of the arms.

“We’ll be having this same conversation at this posture hearing … next year: ‘American people, dig deeper in your pockets because European politicians can’t and won’t get their people to dig deeper into their pockets,’” Waltz said. “It’s a good deal for them. It’s a bad deal for the American people.”

In an appearance on Fox News last week, Waltz said Trump “has been very clear” that the war in Ukraine needs to be driven to some form of conclusion.

“Blank check is a slogan, it’s not a strategy,” Waltz said, criticizing the Biden administration’s open-ended provision of military arms to the government in Kyiv.

The congressman also has been a strong supporter of Israel, and he questioned why the Biden administration has attempted to rein in Israeli military operations and not hit back more forcefully when Iran and other proxy forces tied to the war in Gaza have attacked U.S. troops in the region. If Israel listened to Biden, Waltz has said, it would not have successfully killed Hasan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, and Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas. Both militant groups have been labeled terrorist organizations by the United States and other allies.

Waltz is a fierce critic of China and has drawn the ire of Chinese state media and officials for hawkish outtakes – including spearheading a boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics and calling for China to be punished for its role in the COVID-19 pandemic.

During his time as a lawmaker, he introduced a raft of bills targeting China’s government, including laws to counter Beijing’s influence in the Indo-Pacific and a push to remove China’s preferential developing-nation status.

He’s also a fierce critic of the Biden administration’s policy on China. This month, he co-wrote an article in the Economist that argued Beijing had been the “winner” of Biden’s foreign policy agenda and said the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East should be swiftly wrapped to pivot to a more aggressive agenda confronting the Chinese Communist Party.

Waltz, an Afghanistan war veteran, has taken a pointed, dim view of both Biden’s handling of the 2021 withdrawal and subsequent evacuation from Kabul that ended the 20-year conflict. During a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in March, he detailed how assumptions and promises the Biden administration made about Afghanistan fell apart.

“We failed – and their loved ones are dead because of it,” Waltz said, pointing to the families of some of the 13 U.S. troops killed in a suicide bombing at Kabul Airport during the evacuation.

One issue where Trump’s and Waltz’s positions do not totally square is the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. While Trump has called it a “day of love,” Waltz posted on social media on its first anniversary that it was a “terrible day for sure” and said that “those involved will be brought to justice.”

But Waltz also criticized Vice President Kamala Harris and other officials who compared Jan. 6, 2021, to the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that prompted the United States to join World War II. Such commentary, he said, “is insane and stokes more division.”

Waltz was among the Republicans who questioned Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election but reversed course after the violence at the Capitol, voting to certify the election.