With some Republicans brushing off serious concerns about journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s inclusion in a Signal group chat discussing military strikes in Yemen, many anti-war conservatives who have embraced the new isolationist America First foreign policy are placing blame for the fiasco on one man — national security advisor Michael Waltz, who was responsible for adding Mr. Goldberg to the chat earlier this month. 

Some America Firsters have long been concerned about Mr. Waltz’s commitment to what is described as a “realist” foreign policy agenda of the new administration given his support for keeping American military forces in Afghanistan and his unabashed support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. While he was serving in the military, Mr. Waltz was an advisor to Secretary Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney — two men often derided by President Trump for their foreign policy decisions. 

The disagreements were laid bare on the text thread itself, which Mr. Goldberg made public nearly in its entirety on Wednesday morning. As Mr. Waltz and Secretary Hegseth were telling other national security principals about the plans to bomb Houthi rebels in Yemen, Vice President Vance chimed in to question the logic of defending shipping routes on the other side of the world that are, for the most part, used by Europeans. 

“I think we are making a mistake,” Mr. Vance wrote in the chat. “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez [canal]. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary.”

“I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc,” the vice president said. 

Mr. Waltz came back at the vice president, claiming not only that now was the time to launch the strikes, but that his figures on international trade through the Suez Canal were also incorrect. 

“The trade figures we have are 15% of global and 30% of container. It’s difficult to break that down to US. Specific because much of the container either going through the red sea still or around the Cape of Good Hope our components going to Europe that turns into manufactured good for transatlantic trade to the United States,” Mr. Waltz wrote in the chat. 

“Whether we pull the plug or not today European navies do not have the capability to defend against the types of sophisticated, antiship, cruise missiles, and drones the Houthis are now using,” he added. “So whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.”

“I just hate bailing out Europe again,” Mr. Vance said in a later message. 

The conservatives who are aligned with Mr. Vance’s thinking clearly see Mr. Waltz as the antagonist of this story, given his open disagreement with Mr. Vance in front of other members of the national security council’s principals committee, which is made up of officials like the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury, as well as the directors of the CIA and national intelligence. 

“On policy, if Waltz isn’t fired, he is conceivably emboldened,” the executive editor of the American Conservative, a Pat Buchanan-founded magazine, Curt Mills, writes on X on Wednesday. “Could really embolden congressional hawks — on the one issue, foreign policy, they feel comfortable crossing the White House on.”

“Meanwhile, on the Waltz affair, the Democrats smell blood. Absent a major personnel change, they will say there were no consequences. And so they will pound the issue on and on. So-called ‘National Security’ Democrats actually want this fight too,” Mr. Mills adds. 

Mr. Mills’s predecessor at the American Conservative, Scott McConnell, went much further in a column on Tuesday calling for Mr. Waltz to be sacked. 

“The whole episode leaves one with a feeling redolent of Trump’s first term, when Trump hired people like John Bolton, whose private agenda was to undermine Trump’s efforts to redirect American foreign policy away from the neo-liberal, neoconservative, ‘forever war’ consensus,” Mr. McConnell writes. He says that it is difficult for Mr. Trump to fire tens of thousands of federal employees “and yet keep someone who is leaking information to a powerful ideological enemy of his administration.”

Another supporter of the president, writer and commentator Saagar Enjeti, attacked Mr. Waltz less for his foreign policy positions and more for the unbelievable explanations offered for why Mr. Goldberg was included in the group. Mr. Waltz claimed at the White House on Tuesday that he had never met Mr. Goldberg despite the fact the two were photographed together in 2021. 

“Well well well,” Mr. Enjeti wrote in response to the photo, which showed Messrs. Waltz and Goldberg listening intently to French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

“At this point, Waltz thinks MAGA and Trump are so stupid they will believe his implication that Jeffery Goldberg deliberately went into HIS phone to put his phone number in it under a different contact,” Mr. Enjeti wrote in another post in response to Mr. Waltz’s claims that he has no idea how Mr. Goldberg’s contact made its way into his phone.