The Little-known Aide Helping To Shape Trump’s Europe Policy

Andy Baker’s only moment in the spotlight came by accident — when, in March, Vice President JD Vance named him as his point-person in the administration’s infamous leaked group chat about the Houthi strikes in Yemen.

His low public profile belies his growing influence.

Behind the scenes, the seldom-pictured and extremely private deputy national security adviser has emerged as a key figure in Vance’s orbit, shaping both the vice president’s foreign policy thinking and some of the White House’s most consequential national security decisions — especially its increasingly confrontational stance toward America’s allies in Europe.

And while few outside Washington and European capitals are familiar with Baker, he is key to understanding elements of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy that have befuddled Europe – from Munich to the Donbas.

With Vance emerging as a leading candidate to secure the 2028 Republican nomination, Baker, a self-described “realist” who is skeptical of traditional American alliances and U.S. military intervention abroad, is expected to play an even more important role in shaping the future of the GOP’s foreign policy.

In fact, some believe that Baker will be a key figure no matter who emerges as the Republican standard-bearer.

“Andy is going to play a role in any future administration,” said Alex Wong, Trump’s deputy national security adviser until May when Baker took over the role.

This article is based on interviews with nearly a dozen people, including administration insiders, senior European officials and scholars at foreign policy think tanks. Many were granted anonymity to discuss Baker and his influence.

Baker’s fingerprints are evident on some of the Trump administration’s most norm-shattering postures. He helped draft the fiery speech that Vance delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, according to two people familiar with Baker’s role and a European staffer familiar with his contribution.

Vance’s remarks, which continue to roil European diplomatic circles nearly a year later, lambasted the continent’s leaders for failing to protect free speech and urged them to crack down on illegal immigration, arguing that Europe’s “retreat … from some of its fundamental values” represented the major threat to the transatlantic alliance.

Baker, who declined to comment, also played a major role in compiling the administration’s new National Security Strategy, according to one of the two people familiar with Baker’s role. The strategy echoed Vance’s claim from Munich, that Europe’s retreat from its “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” posed a primary threat to transatlantic security, and cheered the growing influence of “patriotic” nationalist parties in Europe. It also criticized the expansion of NATO and called for an end to “NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

Baker’s role in the Munich speech and strategy document have not been previously reported.

Coupled with the administration’s aggressive new diplomatic posture, Baker’s and Vance’s focus on remaking alliances in Europe and their open skepticism toward NATO poses "a challenge to the whole establishment,” argued Mark Episkopos, Eurasia Research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

“This is much more of a direct challenge because of the way that it's framed,” Episkopos said of Baker’s approach. “It's framed in a way that rejects, or at least casts into serious doubt, the basic underlying assumptions of what it is that we're even supposed to be doing here. What are these values that we're supposed to defend? Why does NATO look the way it does?”

Ideologically, Baker broadly aligns withthe “restrainer” wing of the Republican Party, which looks skeptically on foreign military entanglements and advocates for a limited role for the United States on the global stage.

The administration calls this a “realist” approach or, as laid out in the National Security Strategy, “flexible realism.” Among its core tenets is that America’s foreign policy and alliance structure should be based on a dispassionate calculus of U.S. interests rather than idealistic vision of nations banding together to promote virtuous behavior abroad.

The ascendancy of Baker and “flexible realism” is forcing many European diplomats and officials to come to terms with the idea that Trump’s norm-shattering strain of “America First” foreign policy will likely outlast the president.

A UK government official described Baker as very engaged with his international counterparts. The official said "of course" European governments see this as a lasting shift.

‘Really scarred him’

Baker took a circuitous route to the halls of MAGA power. He grew up in a working-class family in the North Bay area of San Francisco, a traditionally blue-collar area with deep ties to the labor movement and the Democratic Party. After earning a bachelor’s degree in history at the University of California Berkeley, Baker completed graduate work in international relations at Oxford, earning the equivalent of a master’s degree and a PhD in 2007 and spending five years as an academic lecturer.

His Oxford dissertation — which became a book — focused on the establishment of the post-World War II international order and argued that the stability of the post-war order relied on “certain shared social commitments” around national sovereignty and the use of force.

Echoes of that idea formed the ideological core of Vance’s speech in Munich, which claimed that the primary threat to the transatlantic security alliance stems from Europe’s domestic political situation — specifically, in Vance’s view, European leaders’ alleged attempts to censor conservative opponents of abortion and mass migration.

In 2010, Baker joined the State Department as a foreign service officer, a role he occupied for 13 years. His tenure — which included stints in Afghanistan and at NATO headquarters in Brussels — reinforced his jaundiced view of America’s role in the world.

“It seems to have really scarred him,” said the second person familiar with Baker’s role. “He really took the view that U.S. foreign policy was a sort of plaything of the elites which was not being used to benefit the American people — especially the sort of type of people that he came from” in the working class parts of Northern California.

Eventually, Baker came to the view that those working-class constituencies “were not being helped by the Democrats who were out there pushing these wars that were wreaking a lot of damage in far away countries but not really helping anyone in the United States,” the person said.

Baker left the State Department in 2023 intent on finding someone who shared his vision “that American power was being wasted abroad and that it wasn't being used for the benefit of the American people,” the person said. “So he sought out Vance.”

It was a natural pairing: Like Baker, Vance was a bookish conservative with blue-collar roots who adopted a more restrained foreign policy position after getting a firsthand glimpse of the legacy of America’s war on terror — in Vance’s case, via a deployment to Iraq in 2005 while serving in the Marine Corps.

The first-term senator from Ohio brought Baker on as a national security adviser. While working in the Senate, Baker was instrumental in shaping Vance’s opposition to U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

‘A key adviser’

Trump’s victory in 2024 offered Vance and Baker an opportunity to apply their vision on the world stage — and in no place was it more evident than in the administration’s approach to the war in Ukraine. Their long-standing goal of achieving a negotiated end to the war aligned with Trump’s, who made clear he was seeking a quick resolution to a conflict that he viewed as a drain on U.S. resources.

Baker, who is proficient in Russian (as well as Bulgarian and Persian) has played a major role in the efforts to broker a peace deal.

“Andy was a key advisor and implementer on serving and setting up the early contours of the Ukraine negotiation, including things like the minerals deal,” which was signed in October, said Wong.

Throughout the negotiations, Baker has offered “practical” and “creative ideas” to end the war, the first person familiar with Baker’s role said, arguing that his perspective is not anti-Ukraine — as some of his critics allege.

Baker and Vance “really want the U.S., first of all, to stay away from some of the global commitments that they don't think are important for the U.S. And second, they really want to help this war end,” the person added.

Yet Baker’s approach to ending the war has irked some U.S. allies.

One European official described Baker as "very smart" but has come to accept that "his reading of Russia is quite different from ours."

"Andy seems to overestimate Russia's strength and influence. Whereas we see Russia close to the reach of its economic and military power,” the European official said.

Baker took over as deputy national security adviser in the spring, amid Trump’s broader shake-up of the National Security Council. In that role, he works closely with Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio and fellow deputy Robert Gabriel Jr., who is viewed inside the White House as the COO of the NSC, according to Alexander Gray, the chief of staff to the National Security Council during Trump’s first term.

“Andy is definitely more of a foreign policy intellectual, and Robert's more of a practical operator,” Gray said.

The NSC did not respond to a request for comment.

Baker was also in the Situation Room in June when Trump watched American warplanes bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, and he was involved in the planning around the Houthi campaign and the U.S. response to mountingtensions between India and Pakistan this spring, said a third person familiar with Baker’s role.

“Andy Baker is a valuable member of the President’s national security team, whose leadership and judgment plays a key role in advancing the President’s America First agenda and contributed greatly to the Trump administration's historic year of foreign policy wins,” Rubio said in a statement to POLITICO.

'Ideas that resonate'

Despite his growing influence, people familiar with Baker say he presents more like an academic than an operative.

“He’s not a political animal. He’s very careful — he’s a strategist,” the first person familiar with Baker’s role said.

His brainy disposition has earned him allies across the West Wing, and he has grown “really close” to chief of staff Susie Wiles, said a person close to the administration.

“Andy Baker is a crucial part of President Trump’s National Security team and entirely committed to a realist foreign policy that puts America First,” a White House official said in a statement.

His fluency within MAGA foreign policy ideas has made him a highly sought-after contact for foreign officials and European diplomats anxiously trying to make sense of Trump’s shifting foreign policy — and his antagonistic stance toward Europe.

“The foreign governments are all very aware of him. They want to meet with him more than anybody else when they come to town … because he’s very easy to talk to, and even though he's quite a strong ideologue, he’s a good interlocutor,” said the second person familiar with Baker’s role. “You can have a reasonable conversation with him.”

Still, the more restraint-minded voices in the White House do not appear to have a monopoly on Trump’s thinking. At times, the president has followed the lead of more hawkish members of his inner circle — in his decision to bomb Iran in June, for instance, or with the operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January.

Gray, the former NSC chief of staff, suggested that Baker and other realists on the NSC are subordinating some of their personal views in order to deliver on the president’s priorities.

Still, Baker represents an increasingly influential faction of conservative foreign policy thinkers jockeying for influence within the administration.

Among Baker’s key allies is Elbridge Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon. Sometimes characterized as a “prioritizer,” Colby is a leading advocate of the position that the U.S. should reorient its military posture around countering China — even if that means scaling back its presence in areas like Western Europe where it has traditionally maintained a significant footprint. Despite subtle differences in their outlooks, allies often group Baker, Vance and Colby together as both ideological allies and as kindred spirits: All three are engaged in the MAGA intellectual circles and sport academic credentials from prestigious schools — Baker from Oxford, Colby from Harvard and Vance from Yale.

“There are a lot of people like Bridge [and] Andy who have ideas that resonate particularly with the vice president,” said Gray. "I think [Baker] has been very interested in [prioritizing] U.S. resources in ways that get you the most bang for your buck.”

“Even this competition of ideas is itself quite significant,” said Episkopos, referring to the competition between conservative “realists” or “restrainers” and traditional GOP hawks. “[It’s] potentially indicative of where the national discourse is headed.”

Outside observers trying to grasp what a Vancian foreign policy post-2028 might look like would do well to pay close attention to Baker and his ilk, Gray said. “I think he is integral to the vice president's future. People like Bridge Colby and others, I think they reflect a really important part of Republican foreign policy thinking.”

Eli Stokols and Jack Blanchard contributed to this report.