Once They Were Neocons. Now Trump’s Foreign Policy Picks Are All ‘America First.’

The Republican Party used to have a label for the kind of foreign policy hawk that President-elect Donald J. Trump named on Tuesday as his national security adviser and is considering as his secretary of state: neocons.

But while they once were neoconservatives, over the past few years Representative Michael Waltz and Senator Marco Rubio, both of Florida, have gradually shifted their positions. Sounding less like former Vice President Dick Cheney or John R. Bolton, who served as Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, they no longer talk about foreign interventions or the prospects of regime change. Instead, they speak the language of the “America First” movement, and fit more comfortably within Mr. Trump’s often erratic worldview, in which deal-making reigns over ideology.

The result is that Mr. Trump may end up with a foreign policy team composed of deep loyalists, but with roots in familiar Republican approaches. The shift that the two men have made reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.

Mr. Trump’s loyalists, and much of the party, have now made a full conversion to that worldview, few more enthusiastically than Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who was chosen as defense secretary on Tuesday.

Mr. Hegseth channels both Mr. Trump’s avowed isolationism and his impulsive interventionism. He has also backed Mr. Trump’s occasional use of force, notably the order to killing a senior Iranian general in January 2020.

Mr. Hegseth, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, described his own conversion to America First to The New York Times four years ago.