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Which Tulsi Gabbard will Show Up to the White House?

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Representative Tulsi Gabbard at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 13, 2014. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board raises questions about Tulsi Gabbards past views on the policies of Donald Trump, writing:

Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth have received more attention as presidential nominees, but one choice who also deserves Senate scrutiny is former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard. Mr. Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence, or DNI, is on record as opposing the security decisions that made his first-term foreign policy a success.

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The DNI oversees 18 spy agencies and coordinates the intelligence the President and his policy advisers receive. Strong Trump nominees like John Ratcliffe, at the CIA, can corral their agencies and keep them out of politics. But the DNI influences what the President sees each day, how that information is framed, and what the U.S. knows about security threats around the world. This is a job for an honest broker without pronounced policy biases.

Ms. Gabbard, a Democrat until 2022, shares Mr. Trump’s skepticism toward U.S. military involvement abroad. But she stands out as a troubling choice to manage intelligence because her views on the use of force and U.S. foreign policy mark her to the left of even dovish voices in the Democratic Party.

Mr. Trump is proud of his strong Iran policy, which worked. Yet Ms. Gabbard argued for years that Mr. Trump’s first-term policies would start a war. The opposite was true. Her preferred Obama-Biden policy led to the current Middle East war, and Iran accelerated its nuclear program after President Biden’s election.

Watch Ms. Gabbard’s 2019 video (below) “Trump’s Path to War With Iran.” She begins the same way Kamala Harris would: “First, he tore up the Iran nuclear agreement.” For that, and the maximum-pressure sanctions that followed, she calls President Trump a warmonger. But as Mr. Trump often said in this past campaign, those policies had Iran “on its knees.” They also led to the Abraham Accords.

Mr. Trump wants Saudi Arabia in those accords. In 2019 Ms. Gabbard said Mr. Trump had turned the U.S. into the Saudis’ “prostitute.” She pushed to end support for the Saudis in Yemen. President Biden did that, and the Houthis have since shut down most commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

In 2020 Ms. Gabbard assailed Mr. Trump’s strike on Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s terror chief. She said the strike “undermined our national security” and had “no justification whatsoever.” She tried to limit Mr. Trump’s war powers against Iran. In 2018 she tried to cut from the annual defense bill a strategy to counter Iran’s influence. That would also push us toward war, she argued.

She had one note on Iran—Obama-style appeasement was the only way to avoid war—and she was wrong. Given those views, how would she analyze and present new, if uncertain, evidence that Iran is advancing toward a nuclear weapon if she thought it might lead to war?

Read more here.

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