Trump Taps Sebastian Gorka as Senior Director for Counterterrorism: What’s His Stance on Ukraine?
© AP Photo / Susan Walsh
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US President-elect Donald Trump has tapped radio host and political commentator Sebastian Gorka to serve as his White House senior director for counterterrorism.
Sebastian Gorka worked in Trump’s first administration as an advisor on counterterrorism. Trump has touted Gorka, born in the UK to Hungarian parents, as “a legal immigrant to the United States, with more than 30 years of National Security experience.”
Gorka is known as a pro-war hawk. What has he said about the West’s proxy war in Ukraine?
“When the West is weak and there isn't robust leadership from the White House for example, then bad guys do this kind of thing. They make hay when the sun shines,” Gorka said when the Ukraine conflict escalated in February 2022. He added: “We need to bolster NATO nations, we need to arm Ukraine […] to give them as much lethal force that they need to fight for themselves, and make sure that Russia understands that there is a tripwire, and that tripwire is any NATO nation.”
“Sending unaccountable pallets of cash to any country is dumb. I don’t care whether it’s Afghanistan, the Ukraine, or whether it’s Iraq. A, it’s not good geopolitics, and B, it smacks of corruption,” Gorka said in a January 2023 podcast. He speculated that the US must bear part of the moral burden for developments in Ukraine, noting that “We, the Americans, convinced post-communist Ukraine to give up all its nuclear weapons. To give them to who? To Moscow.”
"If you think Ukraine doesn't matter, I've got a wake-up call for you, they're coming after the rest of the former Soviet Union, and we will not be able to say ‘Sorry, that doesn't matter to us,’" Gorka said in an interview in February 2023. He emphasized that sending blank unaccountable checks to Kiev is insanity. “[Ukraine needs] ammunition, artillery shells, the US intelligence target packet […] to make the Russians bleed.”
Donald Trump will bring Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to the negotiating table, Gorka said earlier in November. “He will tell Zelensky that certain things have to be sacrificed, getting Crimea back is probably off the table right now, and he is going to tell Putin ‘Look, if you think that the last few years were bad, the aid given to Kiev will look like a picnic if you don’t stop the fighting,’” Gorka said.
