An Antiwar Candidate?

Gabbard was elected to Congress in 2013. She first captured nationwide attention in 2016, when she resigned from her position as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to endorse Bernie Sanders in his race for the Democratic nomination. In her announcement of that decision, she foregrounded foreign policy, saying that we needed a “commander in chief” who “exercises good judgment.” In context, that seemed to be a slam against Bernie’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, who’d supported the war in Iraq as a senator and promoted US intervention in Libya as secretary of state. At the time, she also seemed to be at least vaguely supportive of Bernie’s domestic agenda of reforms like replacing our awful system of for-profit private health insurance with a “Medicare for All” single-payer system, even if her own focus was on foreign affairs.

Strangely, then, instead of supporting Bernie during his second run in 2020, Gabbard ran a long-shot campaign of her own. And she almost immediately started hedging on core social democratic issues like Medicare for All. Along with other candidates in that race like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, she wanted to keep the “M4A” branding while abandoning the core commitment to a single-payer health care system, instead trying to preserve a role for private insurance. At best, her proposal was a recipe for two-tier care depending on income, with rich people essentially able to buy their way to the front of the line. At worst, it meant forfeiting the core premise that health care is a basic good that should be provided free at the point of service, instead reducing “universal” service to a publicly owned plan sold as a commodity alongside private competitors.

That was disappointing, but again domestic policy was never her primary focus. Supporters of her 2020 run tended to emphasize the idea that she was the most “antiwar” candidate. And it’s true that she talked a lot about the folly of American attempts at imposing “regime change” in distant countries.

But the more closely we look at Gabbard’s “antiwar” history, the more confusing it gets. During the Barack Obama years, she could sometimes be seen on Fox News, identified as a Democrat but still assailing the president for the alleged weakness displayed by his failure to name the enemy America was fighting not as just specific forces like al-Qaeda and ISIS but as “radical Islam” in general. Of course, Obama dropped a lot of bombs and killed a lot of people (both militants and innocent civilians) with drones in Muslim countries during his time in office. Quibbling over what he called the people he killed might seem odd, but Gabbard argued that using this terminology was essential for the United States to have “a real, true understanding of who our enemy is and how important that is, that we have to understand what their motivation is and what their ideology is — the radical Islamic ideology that is fueling them.”

That doesn’t sound particularly “antiwar,” and indeed, even during the year she endorsed Bernie, she was quoted in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald calling herself a “dove” when it came to “counterproductive wars of regime change” but a “hawk” in the global “war against terrorists.” Taken seriously, this gets things exactly wrong. The reason to oppose wars like George Bush’s invasion of Iraq isn’t that the murderously repressive regime of Saddam Hussein had changed, and that changes in regime cause instability. If Hussein had been overthrown by a popular revolution, that would have been cause for celebration. The problem isn’t regime change per se but the reality of cluster bombing, invading, and occupying a country full of innocent people who don’t want us there.

Moreover, since US war planners themselves never made a distinction between the “war against terrorists” and “counterproductive wars of regime change,” always claiming that any particular intervention in the Muslim world served counterterrorist goals, it was hard to predict where Gabbard would come down on any particular foreign policy question. She opposed US backing for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, for instance, correctly describing it as genocidal and even calling Donald Trump “Saudi Arabia’s bitch” because of his financial entanglements with the Saudis and his insistence on continuing to back that war in the face of bipartisan opposition. At the same time, she’s defended the drone war (even while occasionally gesturing in the direction of wanting it be more limited), and for a while she even opposed Obama’s diplomatic détente with Iran.

That last item might be the most telling, since she hasn’t had one position on Iran and Obama’s deal but several. She’s both voted to impose sanctions on Iran as a member of Congress and called for sanctions to be lifted as a presidential candidate.

First, she spent months as a critic of Obama’s diplomacy with Iran and even voted for what Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic called “a Republican-favored piece of legislation that gave the GOP-controlled Congress more power to derail the agreement, and was opposed by Obama, partly for that reason and partly for its potential to damage negotiations with Iran.”

Then she reversed course, voting for a resolution defending it. She hedged her vote with a public explanation that she’d come out in favor not “because it’s a great deal, or even a good deal” but because after several months of opposing it, she’d decided it was the best of bad options. She even went out of her way to point out that it didn’t eliminate the “option” of the United States taking “unilateral or cooperative” military action.

Then, by the time she was gearing up for her own run for president in 2019, she was an enthusiastic supporter of the deal. Fast forward a few years, and Gabbard endorsed Trump — the man who withdrew from the deal as president.

I don’t know if anyone has asked her what she thinks about diplomacy with Iran lately, but it’s anyone’s guess what she would say.

Embracing “Saudi Arabia’s Bitch”

Independent journalist Michael Tracey, who enthusiastically covered Gabbard’s campaign in 2020, described the face she was presenting at the time like this:

Tulsi Gabbard ran an entire presidential campaign advocating for such things as: federal codification of abortion rights, eliminating fossil fuels, banning “assault weapons,” unraveling virtually all US sanctions, condemning Israel for its “illegal occupation” of Palestine — as well as denouncing Trump for betraying his voters, violating the Constitution, and running an “imperial” foreign policy that was hurtling the world into war and nuclear apocalypse.

But that was then. This is now. As Tracey went on to note, every one of these positions has been abandoned. Within months of ending her 2020 campaign, she’d switched from a position on abortion so pro-choice she had 100 percent ratings from Reproductive Freedom for All and Planned Parenthood to introducing a law to ban all abortions after twenty weeks. Similarly, she’d once had a 0 percent rating from the National Rifle Association and a 100 percent rating from the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence, and now she seemed to regret all that, saying in a recent podcast that she’d changed her positions on issues like assault weapons due to “learning, understanding, and that growth in really appreciating our founders’ full intent for the Second Amendment.”

She’s made similar about-faces on the foreign policy questions that have defined her national persona. Far from speaking out for Palestinians while the United States sends two-thousand-pound bombs to drop on schools and hospitals and refugee camps (and as part of a war explicitly aimed at “regime change” in Gaza, no less), Gabbard attended the “March for Israel” in Washington, DC, last November. She’s described Western protesters calling for an end to the war as “puppets” of “radical Islamic” extremists (at least we can locate a through line here) and celebrated the march in support of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Washington, DC, as a matter of standing up against “antisemitism.”

As Tracey has noted, Trump “has actually increased his financial entanglements with the Saudi royal family since Tulsi Gabbard ridiculed him as Saudi Arabia’s ‘bitch,’ and accused him of facilitating ‘genocide’ in Yemen.” If Gabbard’s own positions on Saudi Arabia and Yemen have shifted, she hasn’t said as much in public, and she certainly didn’t feel the need to explain the apparent contradiction when she became an outspoken Trump supporter.

In fact, when Tulsi joined Trump’s entourage at a recent Ultimate Fighting Championship event, she was rubbing shoulders with Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Perhaps there was a whispered argument against genocide, but during the parts picked up by the cameras, everyone seemed to be having a good time.

Many Trump supporters seem to be hoping that, as Trump’s director of national intelligence, Gabbard will be a counterbalance to the influence of warmongering “neocons” like Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of state. If this hope is based on the foreign policy positions she holds right now, or even the ones she’s held in the past, then it may be premature. We’ll all have to wait and see what her worldview looks like next week.