As the Trump administration has in recent days sidelined dozens of career officials on the White House National Security Council amid an internal review of their loyalty to the president’s “America First” agenda, one top foreign policy advisor with more traditional conservative credentials has thrived.

Alex Wong, a seasoned foreign policy hand serving as principal deputy national security advisor under National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, is a familiar face in the new administration, having worked in the State Department as the deputy special representative for North Korea during President Donald Trump’s first term.

In a statement last November, Trump said he was “pleased to announce” Wong would be returning to the administration in a more senior position, citing an extensive résumé that includes high-profile roles in the private sector and on Capitol Hill, where he was a foreign policy advisor to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a defense hawk who now chairs the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee.

The newly appointed deputy advisor — whose career trajectory over more than the past decade helps illustrate the evolution of many government bureaucrats who have survived Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party — has won positive reviews from a diverse range of GOP foreign policy experts, including MAGA converts as well as critics who have questioned some recent national security picks.

Wong worked on Mitt Romney’s unsuccessful 2012 presidential campaign, where he served as foreign policy and legal director for the recently retired senator who has since been an outspoken critic of the president.

Robert O’Brien, who served as a national security advisor in Trump’s first term and remains loyal to the president, described Wong as a “highly skilled MAGA diplomat” who is capable of communicating the administration’s “message to the establishment that might otherwise tune out someone espousing Donald Trump’s policies or try to mock them or belittle them.”

“They can’t do that with Alex,” O’Brien explained in an interview with Jewish Insider on Saturday. “He’s an exception to the rule.”

Meanwhile, John Lehman, who served as secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and has been critical of Trump, said he found Wong to be “very intelligent, well-read and steady” when they worked together on the Romney campaign’s foreign policy team. “He is a solid conservative,” Lehman told JI, “and will be a valuable advisor to the NSA and president.”

Waltz, the newly appointed national security advisor under Trump, said Wong will have “an essential role in helping keep America safe” in a social media post shortly after the November election.

Representatives for the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment from JI about Wong’s new role and the issues he will cover.

Wong, in his mid-40s, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at Harvard Law School. In the late 2000s, he served as an Iraq rule of law advisor for the State Department, where he later helped oversee Indo-Pacific strategy during Trump’s first term. Wong was also involved in the negotiations that led to Trump’s meetings with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-Un, with whom the president has expressed interest in renewing diplomatic outreach.

A vocal defender of Taiwan, Wong, who is Asian American, has cautioned that rising tensions with China have augured “possible conflict that we have not seen since the end of World War II,” as he wrote in a recent essay for the Hudson Institute, where he worked as a senior fellow. During a trip to Taiwan in 2018, Wong, who has served as chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, vowed to “strengthen” U.S. ties to the island nation that is claimed by China and “bolster” its “ability to defend its democracy.”

More recently, Wong has worked in the corporate sector as head of public affairs for the South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang — lobbying government officials in Washington, federal disclosures show.

Former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), the national chairman of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said that Wong “brings experience in a key area” as the Trump administration focuses on the Indo-Pacific region. “There’s probably nobody better,” Coleman told JI, adding that Wong’s “conservative bona fides are impeccable.”

While his expertise has largely been focused on the Indo-Pacific region — which the administration has pledged to prioritize — Wong has voiced support for Israel, calling the Jewish state “a close and steadfast friend” of the U.S. during Senate testimony in 2020, when he was nominated to serve as ambassador for special political affairs at the United Nations.

During an interview with Newsmax last month, Wong affirmed that Trump’s Middle East policy “starts with supporting Israel, our most important ally in the Middle East” and “a pillar of strength in” the region. “That is our partner,” he said. “When we are strong with Israel, Israel is strong in the region, and the region is more peaceful.”

Over the last four years, “we’ve seen Iran on the march moving towards nuclear capability, we’re seeing what’s happening in Syria now, and we saw the horrific attacks of Oct. 7 on Israel,” he added in the interview, while acknowledging instability in the region. “These are all developing, but it begins with standing by our allies.”

He also said the administration would seek to expand “the circle of relationships with our Gulf allies,” as Trump has indicated he will build on the Abraham Accords, with an eye on normalizing ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, a goal that eluded the Biden administration.

Despite such commitments, Wong is joining an administration that is now facing scrutiny from pro-Israel Republicans who have voiced concerns over some new Pentagon appointments pushing a more isolationist foreign policy that is skeptical of Israel and calls for the U.S. to scale back its presence in the Middle East — views that have raised alarms among hawkish conservatives about the direction of Trump’s approach to the region.

But Wong — who could not be reached for comment — is no stranger to navigating ideological divisions over foreign policy within the party, owing in part to his past role on Romney’s campaign, where warring national security factions vied for influence to guide his views.

Even as Romney has long been seen as a persona non grata in today’s GOP, however, Andrew Natsios, who served on the campaign’s foreign policy team in 2012, said there are broad parallels with Trump on key national security questions. “There are stylistic differences, but not on the substance,” he told JI in a recent interview. “They’re both hard-liners when it comes to certain issues.”

In ascending to a top national security post, it couldn’t have hurt, Natsios added, that Wong had more recently worked for Cotton, who had been a contender for vice president. “I think that mitigated any concern the Trump people may have had about his work with Romney,” Natsios said, characterizing the senator as a “hard-liner” who is “in sync in many ways with Trump.”