# Alex Wong The 34th **Principal Deputy National Security Advisor**, in office from January 20 to May 1, 2025 — the deputy who set up the Signal group chat at the center of [[Hegseth Signalgate]], and the first senior official [[Laura Loomer]] removed by name. Five months after leaving the White House he was named the first Global Chief Strategy Officer of **[[Hanwha Group]]**, the South Korean defense and shipbuilding conglomerate, based in Washington. His career is the conventional Republican national-security résumé: Penn, Harvard Law (managing editor of the *Harvard Law Review*), a D.C. Circuit clerkship for Judge Janice Rogers Brown, State Department rule-of-law work in Iraq from 2007 to 2009, foreign and legal policy director for the 2012 Romney campaign, then foreign policy adviser and general counsel to Senator [[Tom Cotton]]. In the first Trump administration he ran regional and security affairs in State's Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs and, from December 1, 2017, served as deputy assistant secretary for North Korea, dual-hatted as deputy special representative for North Korea under Stephen Biegun — which put him in the room for the Singapore and Hanoi summits. ## Signalgate Trump named Wong assistant to the president and principal deputy national security adviser on November 22, 2024. On March 11, 2025, [[Mike Waltz]] created the Signal group in which [[Jeffrey Goldberg]] was inadvertently included; Wong was named in the chat as the official directed to set up a "tiger team" for follow-up on the Yemen strikes. That detail is why his name entered the public record at all — the deputy doing ordinary staff work in an extraordinary place. ## The Loomer removal On April 2, 2025, Loomer met Trump in the Oval Office and named NSC staff she wanted fired. Wong was on her list. She publicly called him the "Chinese Deputy National Security Adviser" and asserted he was working on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party — a claim for which no evidence was produced and which drew an immediate public defense from Cotton, who called Wong and his wife "100% MAGA Warriors." Wong's parents immigrated from Hong Kong. > [!note] What the attack was actually about > Loomer's case against Wong ran through his marriage. His wife, [[Candice Chiu Wong]], is a sitting member of the United States Sentencing Commission who spent nine years as a federal prosecutor in Washington — which was recast as proof of hostile loyalties. Attacking the spouse to reach the official is the mechanism, and it worked. On May 1, 2025, the White House announced that Waltz and Wong would both leave the NSC. Waltz was nominated as ambassador to the United Nations; Wong received no other appointment. **Robert Gabriel Jr.** succeeded him as principal deputy national security adviser. ## Hanwha On September 22, 2025, Hanwha announced Wong as its **first Global Chief Strategy Officer**, a newly created role based in Washington, D.C., leading the group's defense, shipbuilding and aerospace strategy in international markets — the United States and Europe in particular. Hanwha is the conglomerate that bought the Philadelphia shipyard in 2024 and has made U.S. naval shipbuilding capacity its central American play, which is a policy portfolio Wong helped set from inside the government five months earlier. ## Why He Matters for the KB Three separate patterns intersect on one person. He is a **Signalgate casualty who was not the one who made the mistake** — Waltz added the journalist, and Waltz got an ambassadorship. He is the clearest single case of the **Loomer mechanism**: an outside influencer with no clearance, no office and no confirmation removing a Senate-adjacent official in a single Oval Office meeting, on a loyalty theory built out of his wife's job and his parents' birthplace. And he is a fast, clean **[[Revolving Door]]** transit — from setting Indo-Pacific and shipbuilding policy to selling it, in under five months, for a foreign defense contractor whose principal market is the U.S. Navy. ## See Also - [[Hegseth Signalgate]] — the March 2025 Signal chat he was named in - [[Laura Loomer]] — the influencer who called for his removal - [[Candice Chiu Wong]] — his wife, the Sentencing Commission member the attack ran through - [[Mike Waltz]] — the national security adviser removed alongside him - [[Hanwha Group]] — the Korean defense conglomerate he now works for - [[Tom Cotton]] — his former boss, who defended him publicly - [[Revolving Door]] — the pattern his Hanwha move fits