Tulsi Gabbard vs. the War Party

Not long after Donald Trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard to serve as his director of national intelligence (DNI), close to 100 former national security officials signed a letter objecting to her appointment, accusing her of lacking experience and having “sympathy for dictators like Vladimir Putin and [Bashar al-]Assad.”

Trump has now made many controversial foreign policy nominations that stand at odds with his vows to end foreign wars and prioritize peace and domestic problems — including some who are significantly less experienced than Gabbard — yet only the former Hawaiian Congresswoman has received this level of pushback from the national security establishment so far.

There are legitimate criticisms of Gabbard’s record. But this effort is not motivated by any of them. Instead, it’s an attempt to torpedo her appointment because of her more restrained posture toward America's foreign conflicts.

Gabbard is by no means the anti-war advocate’s ideal appointee. Rather than large-scale interventions she has said that she supports killer drones and special forces to hunt terrorists in other countries, pushing the self-defeating idea — advanced by the Bush II and Barack Obama administrations, and more recently, by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel — that terrorism can be defeated through bombs and assassinations, and it does not seem those views have changed.

She was hostile to diplomacy with Iran under Obama. She voted for the nuclear deal, but only after repeatedly criticizing his attempts to forge it, and even backing legislation to undermine the agreement. She has been a staunch supporter of Israel and its war in Gaza, calling American college protesters “puppets of these radical Islamist organizations…that stand opposed to our ideology of freedom.”

But the Washington foreign policy establishment has lurched to such extremes over the past decade, that the once fairly banal positions held by former President Barack Obama — who did not view Ukraine as a core U.S. interest worth going to war over, and was wary of growing American military involvement that could provoke a proxy war with Russia — have now become cast as radical, even treasonous. In this context, Gabbard looks like a moderate.

Gabbard — a U.S.veteran who served in the Iraq War and is currently a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army reserves — remains one of the shockingly few voices to foreground the threat of nuclear war as a priority for U.S. policy toward the Ukraine war, as well as to advocate for a negotiated solution to the conflict.

She is likewise one of the depressingly few voices to ever warn about the very real nuclear risk of ratcheting tensions with China, has criticized Trump’s trade war with the country, and has urged a peaceful, cooperative U.S. relationship with Beijing — and at a time when virtually the entire Washington establishment is dead set on a policy of confrontation.

And despite her hostility at the time to the Iran deal, she has repeatedly warned that war with Iran would be a disaster, and bitterly criticized Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani as unconstitutional and “an act of war.”

These views don’t just make Gabbard an outlier in establishment circles; more pertinently, they would make her an outlier in the incoming Trump cabinet, the key foreign policy posts of which have been almost entirely filled with ultra-hawks on either Russia, China, Iran, or all three.

In other words, whatever one thinks of Gabbard, she would functionally be one of the few voices speaking in Trump’s ear urging that he act with restraint towards two nuclear superpowers, as almost everyone in media, Washington, and his own administration pushes him to escalate against both.

That much of the foreign policy establishment is bent on this same disastrous path explains the vociferous objections to Gabbard’s nomination in the December letter. In it they point to her visit to Syria in 2017 to meet with Bashar al-Assad (something then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi did in 2007) as an example of aligning “herself with Russian and Syrian officials.” Gabbard has repeatedly called Assad a “brutal dictator” but also insisted that “if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there is a possibility that we can achieve peace.”

Indeed, U.S. officials seem to agree with this philosophy, since today they are in discussions with Assad’s replacement, Ahmed al-Shara, whose Islamist militant group used to be affiliated with al-Qaeda, which was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and has been responsible for numerous human rights abuses and cases of repression. Nevertheless, Democrats and Gabbard’s Washington critics have come out in recent weeks to accuse her of “cozying up to dictators,” and being “compromised” and calling her nomination “the way to Putin’s heart.”

In reality, if “chumminess” with dictators was actually disqualifying for a government position, virtually all of Washington would be out of a job.

Hillary Clinton famously boasted about former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak and his wife being “friends of my family.” The Bush family, among others, were famously close with a prominent member of the despotic Saudi royal family, who, unlike anyone in Syria, was actually complicit in carrying out an attack on the United States. Congressional and executive staffers, and even former members of Congress regularly leave government to lobby for these and other dictatorships. The Biden team has personally offered the House of Saud all manner of enticements over the last four years to play nice with Israel and to help control oil prices.

Some of the signatories themselves are less-than-hostile to foreign autocracies. Take Former Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, the very first listed signatory: she was for years on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, one of whose top funders is the despotic and warmongering government of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and spent years at Albright Stonebridge Group, which works to leverage former government connections to open doors for corporations in sometimes brutal autocracies like both the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Last year, another signatory, Caspian Policy Center Senior Fellow Eric Rudenshiold, was part of a delegation meeting with Azerbaijan’s government-owned Port of Baku to explore future business opportunities with the West, only a year after its authoritarian, election-rigging leader had ethnically cleansed and military retaken a contested territory from its neighbor, Armenia.

The Caspian Policy Center in general regularly meets with Azerbaijani officials and facilitates their meetings with U.S counterparts to encourage deepening ties between the two governments, something it’s hard to believe would go by without an eyebrow being raised if they did the same with Syria or Russia.

You could go down the list and find other names with similar backgrounds.

Ironically, the one foreign authoritarian leader that Gabbard does have concrete links to, and has been inarguably friendly with, is the one that goes unmentioned in both the letter and in most establishment criticism of Gabbard. That would be Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been accused of inciting a deadly anti-Muslim pogrom and, as prime minister, has cracked down on press freedoms, civil liberties, and political opponents.

It’s all a reminder that the signatories don’t really oppose talking to “bad guys.” They are cynically using such rhetoric as cover for much narrower objections that include Gabbard’s past sins against the Democrats (endorsing Bernie Sanders in 2016 over Hillary Clinton, and leaving the party, calling it “an elitist cabal of warmongers,” in 2022), and her serving as a potential obstacle to maintaining a militarized posture against Russia and China and to the War Party itself in Washington, which has long enjoyed buy-in from both party elites.

Sadly, if Gabbard is voted down, her most likely replacement would not be someone with more consistent anti-war views than her — it would be someone with much more hawkish bonefides and much less likely to buck the system.