It’s clear we’re not applying a long-standing American obligation for all statesmen to avoid meeting or working with immoral despots.

In our editorial opposing the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence, we make much of Gabbard “sitting down with the blood-soaked Syrian despot”:

Infamously, she followed in Nancy Pelosi’s footsteps when she set herself, literally, on the road to Damascus in 2017. Like Pelosi, there was no grander objective in sitting down for nearly three hours with the blood-soaked Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad other than to embarrass the sitting Republican president. She hoped to box Trump in and keep him from reacting with force to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Even her own staff was reportedly shocked and confused by the amount of time she spent with Assad.

There is no need to speculate about her objectives at the time. As Gabbard constantly explained to anyone who would listen, her objective was to seek an end to the war and to prevent deeper U.S. involvement in it:

“Whatever you think about President Assad, the fact is that he is the president of Syria,” she said. “In order for any peace agreement, in order for any possibility of a viable peace agreement to occur there has to be a conversation with him.”

She came back to the United States and reported on her conversations:

 “(The Syrians) asked me, ‘Why are the United States and its allies supporting these terror groups which are destroying Syria, when it was al Qaeda that attacked the United States on 9/11, not Syria.’ I didn’t have an answer to them.”

Was it wrong to seek an end to the war? Or wrong for her to oppose empowering al-Qaeda?

It’s clear we’re not applying a long-standing American obligation for all statesmen to avoid meeting or working with immoral despots. FDR allied us with Stalin. Nixon made a deal with Chairman Mao. More recently, we did not punish Saudi Arabia for bombing a hospital in Yemen during the world’s worst modern cholera outbreak. We barely punished them for chopping up an American journalist. Our leaders sit with Xi even though his government conducts a policy of ethnic cleansing against the Uyghurs.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently spoke with Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the former head of al-Nusra (al-Qaeda in Iraq) and the leader of HTS, the designated terrorist group that drove Assad out of power. He did this even though the entire legal authority under which U.S. troops operate in Syria is the post-9/11 AUMF that authorizes us to destroy al-Qaeda. Incidentally, these events vindicated Gabbard’s reticence and criticism of U.S. involvement; she was correct that the fall of Assad would mean the rise of al-Qaeda.

Objections to Gabbard lack any articulation of the principle her critics are supposedly upholding and which she transgressed. If there is any principle at all it seems to be she called out what was otherwise the silent view of our bipartisan foreign policy consensus, expressed pithily by Jake Sullivan in an email to Hillary Clinton — the stupid fantasy that al-Qaeda “is on our side in Syria.”