March 26, 2025 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump may have kept the neoconservative likes of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo out of his second administration, but he’s invited in others who could just as easily undermine his administration. Prominent among those is Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, two-time failed Republican presidential nominee, well-known Christian Zionist and Trump’s nominee to become U.S. ambassador to Israel.
Huckabee appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday for his confirmation hearing where he came out of the gate promising that his past views on Israel and Palestine would not be a factor in his duties as ambassador should he be confirmed. “I am not here to articulate or defend my own views or policies, but to present myself as one who will respect and represent the President whose overwhelming election by the people will hopefully give me the honor of serving as ambassador to the State of Israel,” Huckabee said in his opening statement, reported AP. He acknowledged his past support for Israel’s ostensible right to annex the West Bank and incorporate its Palestinian population into Israel—views which Democrats questioned and that even some moderate Jewish groups consider “extreme"—but said it would not be his “prerogative” to carry out that policy. “If confirmed, it will be my responsibility to carry out the President’s priorities, not mine,” Huckabee said in response to Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley’s questions.
Most notably, AP says, Huckabee has long been opposed to the idea of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinian people. In an interview last year, he went even further, saying that he doesn’t even believe in referring to the Arab descendants of people who lived in British-controlled Palestine as “Palestinians.”
If he’s confirmed he’ll likely be welcomed by right-wing Zionists in Israel such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has advocated annexation of the West Bank and “voluntary migration” of the Palestinians out of Gaza.
Another figure who could be raising eyebrows is Michael Anton, the director of policy planning at the State Department and one of the U.S. negotiators in Riyadh in the March 23-25 talks with Ukrainian and Russian negotiators. According to his Wikipedia entry, he was deputy assistant to the president for strategic communications on the National Security Council under Trump. He is a former speechwriter for Rupert Murdoch, Rudy Giuliani, and Condoleezza Rice, and worked as director of communications at the investment bank Citigroup and as managing director of investing firm BlackRock.
The entry says that “Anton is considered to be a notable West Coast Straussian, as a student of Leo Strauss by way of tutor Harry V. Jaffa, and he specializes in the study of Niccolò Machiavelli.”
There is no evidence of any real professional diplomatic training or experience in Anton’s profile—he’s mainly been a speechwriter and in public relations and is described as an ideological “America Firster”—so what’s he doing at the State Department?
