Mike Waltz

Mike Waltz is a retired US Army Special Forces colonel and former Republican congressman from Florida who served as President Trump's National Security Adviser from January to September 2025. In September 2025 he was confirmed by the Senate as US Ambassador to the United Nations, the role he now holds.

As UN Ambassador, Waltz leads Trump administration efforts to reshape the UN's priorities toward core diplomacy, burden-sharing and peacekeeping reform, including the organisation's first major budget cut. His military background as a Green Beret, with deployments to Afghanistan, continues to shape an operational, enforcement-first instinct that carried over from his NSA tenure into his current UN posting.

Waltz has been a consistent hawk on Iran throughout his career. As a congressman, he advocated maximum-pressure sanctions and military options. As NSA, he was widely credited as a driving force behind the escalatory arc of the Iran conflict in 2026, including the decision to Conduct kinetic enforcement operations against Iranian tankers rather than relying solely on financial sanctions. The MOU Deadline framework and the tanker-strike decision are both consistent with a Waltz-influenced NSC preference for demonstrated capability over pure diplomatic signalling.

His hawkish posture followed him into the Ambassador role: at the UN Security Council's 19 May 2026 emergency session on the drone strike near the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant, Waltz demanded Iran halt what he called 'proxy attacks' on neighbouring states.

At the UN General Assembly's 7-8 July 2026 annual debate on the US embargo against Cuba, Ambassador Waltz displayed photographs and named a series of Cuban political prisoners, including visual artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, musician Maykel Osorbo, rapper Miguel Castillo Perez, poet Duanes Leon, and brothers Jorge and Martin Perdomo, arguing the real embargo is the one Havana imposes on its own people.

When Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla twice interrupted his address with procedural motions, Waltz told the Cuban delegation: 'Do whatever you want. This isn't Havana; this is the United States of America and the United Nations. We will speak, and we won't be silenced like you do with your own people.' The exchange came during a special session Cuba itself requested, and the Assembly's vote to open the session, 136 in favour, nine against, 30 abstentions, was markedly lower than the 165 votes Cuba secured for its annual embargo resolution in October 2025.