Her sway over the president and, thus, the conduct of U.S. affairs abroad, will be heavily dependent on Trump’s mood.
Donald Trump’s intention to nominate former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence struck a discordant note given his staffing choices thus far.
With Marco Rubio at State, John Ratcliffe at the CIA, Elise Stefanik at the United Nations, Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon, and even Kristi Noem heading to the Department of Homeland Security, Trump’s Cabinet has so far been flush with conservative Republicans, none of whom can be fairly described as radicals. And given the exceedingly conventional makeup of the Senate GOP’s leadership, it seems the appetite for radicalism among the party’s most influential members is, at most, tepid. Gabbard is different.
As I’ve written repeatedly, the erstwhile Democrat’s instincts on foreign policy align more with those who are suspicious of the projection of American power abroad. But that suspicion so often seems to lead Gabbard to a place of ill-advised credulity when she encounters narratives that cast American power as malign and its interests as misbegotten.
Gabbard joined those in the Right’s more paranoid quarters in suggesting that the first Trump administration acted on faulty information or even falsified intelligence itself to justify the president’s 2017 strikes against the Syrian regime following one of its chemical-weapons attacks on civilians. She followed Nancy Pelosi’s footsteps in making a sojourn to Damascus, where she served as a prop for the blood-soaked Bashar al-Assad regime. She bought wholesale the utterly baseless line retailed by Moscow that Russia and its vassal state were the only countries committed to fighting ISIS. In contrast, she maintained, the United States was helping prop up radical elements within Syria’s anti-Assad rebels (the Assad regime took a hands-off approach to ISIS and even purchased its own oil from the terrorist group while it subdued the more moderate insurgents in places like Homs and Aleppo).
To my knowledge, Gabbard has not repudiated those positions. They cannot be described as “anti-war,” as so many of her boosters would like to claim, because she deploys them in support of war — Syria’s wars, Russia’s wars, and the terrorists’ wars, just not America’s wars. Nor can they be described as “anti-imperialist,” despite her best efforts to market that as her worldview. Insofar as Russia’s war of subjugation and conquest in Ukraine is an outgrowth of the West’s heedless antagonism of Moscow over the years, imperialism is justified. And the former congresswoman takes a dim view of America as an exceptional nation. She expounded on her views less than a month into Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine:
“This is what’s so dangerous about the place that we’re in right now as a country, where this idea, this principle, this foundation of freedom of speech, freedom of expression is directly under threat and under attack. And you’re right, it’s not so different. What’s happening here is not so different from what we’re seeing happening in Russia, where you’ve got state TV and controlled messaging across the board. This is where we’re at.”
The social compact in the United States, which is guaranteed by the founding documents and in law as well as convention, is nothing like the one that prevails in Russia. Gabbard stands out from her fellow nominees to Donald Trump’s national-security apparatus, which sets the stage for a conflict. Whose views will win out — the establishmentarians at State, DOD, the CIA, and the U.N., or ODNI?
Most likely, if she is confirmed, Gabbard’s influence will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Unlike Joe Biden’s DNI, Avril Haines, Gabbard was not at the top of the president-elect’s list of nominees. Her rollout was comparatively late in the process. The president will determine the ODNI’s power to shape the course of events. “Historically, the DNI had authority on paper that didn’t always translate into bureaucratic clout,” the Washington Post observed. Gabbard’s sway over the president and, thus, the conduct of U.S. affairs abroad, will be heavily dependent on Trump’s mood.
What Trump may be seeking in Gabbard is less of a foreign-policy hand with a global vision and more of a figure who will rein in what he regards as rogue elements within America’s intelligence services. By all accounts, he retains his hostility toward the “deep state,” which he believes meddled beyond its remit in domestic political affairs. If that is the bulk of Gabbard’s portfolio, her conflicts with the rest of Trump’s national-security team will be fewer and farther between.
If it is not, however, Trump will soon find that her worldview is incompatible with that of the Republican Party she formally joined in October.