The Free Press
You have probably never heard of Dan Caldwell. But he is playing a major role in shaping President Donald Trump’s foreign policy. As head of the transition’s “landing team” at the Department of Defense, he is stocking the Pentagon’s all-important middle ranks with policy personnel who share his view that the U.S. needs to dramatically reduce its military footprint abroad, according to four Trump administration officials who spoke to The Free Press of Caldwell’s mounting influence with concern bordering on alarm.
Their fear did not stem from a belief that there’s something desirable about war, of course. On the contrary: Many are proponents of the “peace through strength” that Trump campaigned on. The debate has less to do with “peace” than it does with the definition of “strength.” The concern is that Caldwell is a stalking horse for a rising faction within the party that will weaken America’s global standing. “Dan Caldwell wants America to come home from the world. That’s his first and only priority,” one Senate Republican aide said.
And Caldwell is going places. Two Trump officials told The Free Press he is slated to become deputy to retired general Keith Kellogg as Trump’s envoy to Russia and Ukraine—which would give him extraordinary influence over the peace negotiations between the two warring countries.
Caldwell is part of a foreign policy movement on the right who call themselves “restrainers.” They believe countering Iran, Russia—and, for some, even China—is not worth the smoke. Caldwell himself told the Financial Times in December that he would not make a commitment to defend Taiwan, or make “more security commitments in the Pacific.” Instead, Caldwell said he believes the U.S. should focus on arming the island in a bid to deter China.
If the “restrainers” have an intellectual leader it is Trump’s choice for the number three position at the Pentagon, Elbridge Colby. The grandson of William Colby, the legendary CIA director, Bridge, as he is known, has written eloquently about the danger an overextended military poses to America’s ability to deter China. He makes a compelling argument that America’s involvement in Ukraine and the Middle East saps precious resources from a future conflict with China. (Listen to him make that argument on this Honestly debate.)
Colby offers the most serious version of the case for restraint. The less serious version often comes out like a 2000s-era progressive conspiracy theory according to which any official who supports a hard line on Russia or Iran sanctions is trying to mire the republic in another forever war.
The loudest cheerleaders for these “restrainers” have been Don Jr., the president’s son, and the broadcaster Tucker Carlson. On the latest episode of his show, he asserted that “neoconservatives” were sabotaging Trump’s foreign policy by criticizing some lower-level officials. “It’s shocking to me that two months after Trump’s landslide victory,” Carlson said, “the neocons are still brazen enough to try and influence and sabotage his nominations.” This odd reframing tends to airlift the debate back to the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War that Carlson himself supported.
“Tucker is not speaking for the administration,” a senior Trump transition official said. “If Tucker was making decisions on our foreign policy, Marco Rubio wouldn’t be the secretary of state and the U.S. wouldn’t have lifted Biden’s hold on 2,000-pound bombs to Israel.”
That does not mean, however, that he is not going to influence the conflict shaping up in these early days of this administration between the “restrainers” and those championing deterrence, maximum pressure, and other foreign policy strategies that Trump campaigned on and argued, not without reason, kept America out of war in his first term.
In some ways this argument inside the GOP echoes the battles between isolationists and interventionists in the aftermath of World War II. Since the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, this inward-looking wing of the GOP has been in retreat. It was the Democrats who were the anti-interventionists in the Cold War after Vietnam, and also in the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But over the last decade the neo-isolationists have been ascendant. In part this is because the 9/11 wars in the Middle East did not end in victory.
It is also in no small part due to the largesse of oil magnate and libertarian donor Charles Koch. Since the mid-2010s, Koch has funded a growing network of think tanks, advocacy groups, and academic programs aimed at shrinking America’s role in the world.
Charles Koch and his late brother David traditionally steered clear of foreign policy in their political giving; they are mainly associated with supporting conservative and libertarian causes on the domestic front. But beginning in 2016, Charles Koch began supporting foreign policy ideas out of the Republican Party mainstream at the time, such as the view that America’s role in the Middle East was an unacceptable drain on national resources.
“My problem with the Koch/libertarian wing is that they are open borders and they do business with anybody, specifically the Chinese Communist Party, which they fight assiduously not to confront,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist for his 2016 campaign, told The Free Press.
One of the first major conferences funded by Koch money in 2016, for example, featured talks from Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the co-authors of a conspiratorial book, The Israel Lobby, that suggested U.S. foreign policy was unduly controlled by groups like AIPAC and other pro-Israel organizations in Washington. The book curiously omits the role of money from Gulf Arab states in the academy and Washington. A few years later, in 2019, the Charles Koch Foundation provided the initial seed funding—along with the George Soros–funded Open Society Foundations—for the Quincy Institute, another think tank that fractured in 2022 after it could not bring itself to officially criticize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year.
Trump himself has been critical of Koch after its political network backed his primary opponent, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. On January 15, he posted on his Truth Social network a warning to anyone applying for jobs in his new administration that he wasn’t interested in people who had worked for Americans for Prosperity, one of the key nodes of the Koch network. Whether Trump knows it or not, Caldwell was a lobbyist for that very same Koch outfit between 2017 and 2020.
And he’s not the only one.
Both Michael DiMino, who is slated to be the next deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, and Andrew Byers, who has been tapped for the same position on Southeast Asia, also come from the Koch network. DiMino worked as an analyst for Defense Priorities, a Koch-funded group, and Byers is the former head of foreign policy for the Charles Koch Foundation. Their positions at the Pentagon, known colloquially as DASDs, do not require Senate confirmation. But they play a critical role as the Pentagon’s ambassador to the region’s foreign militaries and shaping broader U.S. military strategy.
The Koch analysts joining the Pentagon this time around will be working for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who on Friday survived a razor-thin confirmation vote. Hegseth has an interesting ideological backstory. He was initially cultivated in the late 2000s and early 2010s by neoconservatives. His first nonprofit was Vets for Freedom, which argued for a more robust intervention in the war on terror. But as Vets for Freedom began to run out of funding in 2010, the Koch network funded a new veterans advocacy group known as Concerned Veterans for America, which Hegseth originally helmed in 2011.
It was at Concerned Veterans for America that Hegseth met Caldwell, and the two veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars became close. But unlike Caldwell, Hegseth has remained hawkish when it comes to foreign wars, for the most part. At his confirmation hearing this month, Hegseth sounded bullish on Israel: “I support Israel destroying and killing every last member of Hamas,” he said. Privately, he assured skeptical senators during the transition that he would not support a sudden collapse of U.S. aid to Ukraine. And on China, Hegseth has said the Chinese Communist Party will be the main focus of the U.S. military under his watch.
In this, Hegseth sounded very different from the restrainers, whose understanding of the world often sounds like that of the Obama Democrats Trump defeated in 2016. “Instead of doubling down on American primacy,” Caldwell wrote in an essay he co-authored shortly after Trump’s 2024 election victory for Foreign Affairs, “the GOP should more fully embrace a foreign policy of realism and restraint that prioritizes American interests over maintaining the hegemony of liberal values worldwide.” This is almost identical to the arguments that Obama made in the early 2010s for pivoting away from the Middle East and Europe toward Asia. In 2021, Caldwell tweeted a backhanded endorsement of former president Joe Biden’s choice for envoy to Iran, Rob Malley, who lost his security clearance in 2023.
As for Michael DiMino, he urged the U.S. to restrain Israel from attacking Hezbollah over the summer, as the Iran-backed terror group was firing missiles on its territory, a position in tension with Trump’s decision over the weekend to lift Biden’s freeze on sending 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. DiMino has also openly poured cold water on the Abraham Accords, the signature foreign policy success of Trump’s first term, when four Arab states signed peace agreements with Israel. In 2023, DiMino co-authored a paper for Defense Priorities that argued the U.S. should not offer the Saudis a security guarantee for normalizing its relationship with Israel. This month, ahead of his appointment, he deleted his Twitter account.
A Republican lobbyist with close ties to Trump World said DiMino made no sense inside the Trump administration. “You have a guy who is going to be the deputy for Middle East policy who doesn’t think the United States should be in the Middle East. Somebody should call Elon at DOGE.”
The new deputy assistant secretary of defense for Southeast Asia, Andrew Byers, is also on the same wavelength as Caldwell. He wrote in Foreign Affairs last year that America should continue to arm Taiwan “so it can deter and hopefully defeat a Chinese invasion.” But, he adds, “Taiwan is not a U.S. ally, and so Washington should not risk war with China to outright defend it.”
For now, Republicans on the Hill who fret about this group’s potential influence are trying to warn Hegseth directly. “Lots of people are reaching out to Hegseth and asking about Caldwell and these picks,” a Senate Republican aide told The Free Press. “Hegseth keeps saying, don’t worry, I’m in charge, you know where I stand.” We will find out soon enough.
Donald Trump, just sworn in as the 47th president, was reelected to be a wrecking ball to the Beltway elites. And while this populist moment feels unprecedented, Eli Lake, host of our new show “Breaking History,” says it’s not—the rebuke of the ruling class is encoded in our nation’s DNA. Listen to the first episode below or wherever you get your podcasts.
