As Donald Trump's second presidency gets under way, many of his cabinet nominees are drawing outrage from his political opponents.
Pete Hegseth, now confirmed as secretary of defence, still faces concerns over his inexperience as well as further allegations of spousal abuse. Robert F Kennedy Jr, intended for the Department of Health and Human Services, is a known anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist.
Trump's nominee for FBI director, Kash Patel, has repeatedly suggested using federal law enforcement mechanisms to pursue Trump's enemies.
But among them all, one name has raised the alarm not just domestically but across the Western world: Trump's nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
A former congresswoman from Hawaii, Gabbard identified as a progressive Democrat for many years and even ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019-2020.
However, since failing in that race, she has gravitated toward the hard right of the US political spectrum, frequently appearing on pro-Trump network Fox News and becoming one of Trump's top supporters on the 2024 campaign trail.
And with Gabbard, it's not about Trump. Her previous sympathy towards Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and defence of Vladimir Putin's foreign policy have set the national security community against her — to the point where nearly 100 former officials jointly signed an open letter warning about "her ability to deliver unbiased intelligence briefings to the president, Congress, and to the entire national security apparatus."
"The Senate must carefully evaluate whether ... Gabbard is equipped to effectively oversee an organisational structure as unique and large as the National Intelligence Program and also the effect of her holding this position on the willingness of our closest allies to share intelligence with the US," the letter said.
Gabbard's pro-Russian tilt is particularly striking. She has long propagated Russian-sympathetic and anti-Western views on Moscow's invasion of Ukraine, often cited by Russian state TV which sometimes described her as "our friend Tulsi."
According to Scott Lucas, a professor of international politics at University College Dublin, it is not simply a matter of whether or not Gabbard is in the Kremlin's pay.
"Gabbard's not a Russian asset in the sense that she's bought and paid for by the Russians," he explains. "Gabbard is doing this because of a particular worldview, which has been reinforced by the way that social media and disinformation on it consolidates that worldview, which you could loosely call anti-imperialism."
"The Russians will exploit people like her. They'll promote her because she's saying things that echo their propaganda lines. She's not taking money; it's not like they've got leverage on her to make her do this, not that we know of. She is a Russian asset in the sense that she amplifies and reinforces their propaganda lines."
So how did Gabbard get to this point, and what are the chances that despite her history, she could soon be appointed as one of the US' most senior intelligence officials?
The political horseshoe
Having previously served in the US military, Gabbard has long positioned herself as an anti-war crusader and a staunch critic of US foreign policy. As part of this identity, she has sometimes taken the side of governments whom most in her former party would have considered well beyond the pale.
Most notoriously, she was perhaps the most prominent US politician to show solidarity with al-Assad after his brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests escalated into a catastrophic civil war, one marked by allegations of crimes against humanity committed by his regime with the backing of Russian forces.
Gabbard repeatedly voiced doubts about well-documented evidence of these crimes. In one infamous incident on a congressional visit to Syria in 2015, she suggested to victims of an airstrike that it may not have been launched by the Syrian military but by the so-called Islamic State group, which has never had an air force.
She also paid an unsanctioned solo visit to al-Assad in January 2017, several years into the conflict and well after his forces had attacked Syrian civilians with chemical weapons — incidents thoroughly investigated and corroborated by evidence by the likes of the US and the UN. At the time, Gabbard said she met with him in the interest of ending the war.
"When the opportunity arose to meet with (al-Assad), I did so, because I felt it's important 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 could achieve peace," she said.
Gabbard was not a senior member of Congress at the time and did not hold a diplomatic office. Nonetheless, she introduced legislation to end the US support for certain Syrian rebel groups — in her words, to "end our war to overthrow the Syrian government."
The congresswoman's one-person mission to Damascus and her other statements about the conflict were so divergent from that of Washington that in 2018, there were serious concerns that she might leak closed-door testimony given to the House Foreign Affairs Committee by Syrian dissidents.
The briefing went ahead with Gabbard on the panel but with the Syrian witness disguised.
Sympathy for the Kremlin
Speaking after her visit in 2017 and after the first Trump administration had confirmed the US' assessment that al-Assad had used banned chemical weapons in a recent strike, Gabbard said she was "sceptical" of the claims.
"There are a number of theories of exactly what happened that day,” she told CNN. “Standing here pointing fingers does not accomplish peace for the Syrian people. It will not bring about an end to this war.”
By framing the war in the terms she did, Gabbard moved into the same territory as a number of prominent Western conspiracy theorists, distributed across the hard left and hard right of the political spectrum, who sought to depict the conflict as the result of a brazen Western-led regime change operation.
Many of them cast doubt on the motives and identity of Syrian volunteer medics, claimed the al-Assad government's notorious chemical attacks had been staged, and vigorously defended Russia's often-brutal involvement in the conflict.
While her views in Syria drew criticism for their perceived moral relativism when it came to al-Assad's actions, her increasingly bold defences of Russia's involvement and remarks about Washington's policy toward the Kremlin in general quickly earned Gabbard a reputation as a reckless influence on the left.
A further shift to the right
Having resigned from the House of Representatives and finished her last term in January 2021, Gabbard began her post-congressional career with increasingly incendiary comments about her former colleagues.
Shortly after the 6 January attack on the US Capitol, she equated Democratic members of Congress to "domestic terrorists", accusing them of "trying to undermine our constitutionally-protected rights and turn our country into a police state with KGB-style 'surveillance'" — and calling them "much more powerful, and therefore dangerous, than the mob which stormed the Capitol".
Come the start of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Gabbard was among those arguing that the conflict was in fact the West's fault.
"This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of NATO, which would mean US/NATO forces right on Russia’s border," she tweeted as the invasion began.
"NATO troops on Ukrainian soil" was one of the tropes the Kremlin used to justify its all-out war against its western neighbour, now nearing its third year. Moscow has failed to produce any evidence to back these claims since.
Gabbard's full-on political transition only accelerated as the Biden administration wore on. With increasingly frequent appearances on Fox News and star turns at the highly conservative CPAC conference, she steadily drew more support from the anti-Biden right while continuing to advocate for US withdrawal from overseas conflicts — including the relaxing of sanctions on Russia.
By the end of 2022, Gabbard left the Democratic Party altogether. In a statement posted to X, she made clear that what repelled her about the Democrats was no longer just the party's stance on international affairs, but its position in what the right views as a "culture war".
“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party that is under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racialising every issue and stoking anti-white racism,” she wrote.
By the time Trump's re-election campaign reached its final stage in the summer of 2024, Gabbard was one of his main advocates, helping prep him for his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris and sometimes headlining rallies in her own right.
And not long after Trump was re-elected, he announced he would appoint Gabbard to the top intelligence role she now stands at the brink of attaining.
The nightmare scenario
While the Republicans are in control of the Senate and publicly appear fully behind Trump's agenda, Gabbard's confirmation is far from guaranteed, especially with the party's majority in the chamber being so thin.
For Europe, the main question is whether Gabbard's worldviews could negatively impact the already precarious security situation on the continent, further exacerbated by the ongoing war.
According to Matthew Savill, military sciences director at the UK think tank RUSI, the US and its closest intelligence allies — the so-called Five Eyes — share too much mutual benefit for information flows to be too tightly controlled because of one appointee.
"The UK benefits enormously from being part of the Five Eyes because our contribution results in access to the huge intelligence insights and set of capabilities that only the US provides," Savill told Euronews.
"However, that sharing of intelligence does not necessarily lead to the same assessment and judgements on the scale of the threat, for example, several European countries were sceptical as to the likelihood of Russia invading Ukraine again in 2022, even after UK and US briefings," he explained.
"There is always an element of politics in how intelligence is acted upon, even if collection and assessment try to remain apolitical."
Jamie Gaskarth, a professor of foreign policy and international relations at the Open University whose work focuses on accountability in the intelligence services, explained to Euronews that the US is so central to the global security order that even with Gabbard in place, other countries would have little choice but to continue dealing with it on much the same basis as they currently do.
"The US has the most advanced intelligence collection machinery in the world so allies cannot afford to sever links or risk losing access to these resources," he said.
"Raw intelligence is collated, analysed and synthesised before it is presented to senior policymakers, so this process should preserve its integrity."
"If Gabbard sought to view and use raw intelligence, this could be a problem as it would violate the 'control principle' that whoever acquired the intelligence retains a say over how it is used," Gaskarth added.
"And if this became a pattern, it is possible that US intelligence agencies would themselves be careful about how much they revealed to their own leadership, creating serious problems of trust and democratic accountability."
Comments
Leave a Comment