Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard – an antiwar stalwart?

Branko Marcetic looks at various aspects takes a look at Trump nominee for Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard. He warns that Gabbard doesn’t look much like a an antiwar selection:

Gabbard is by no means the anti-war advocate’s ideal appointee. Rather than large-scale interventions she has said that she supports killer drones and special forces to hunt terrorists in other countries, pushing the self-defeating idea — advanced by the Bush II and Barack Obama administrations, and more recently, by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel — that terrorism can be defeated through bombs and assassinations, and it does not seem those views have changed.

She was hostile to diplomacy with Iran under Obama. She voted for the nuclear deal, but only after repeatedly criticizing his attempts to forge it, and even backing legislation to undermine the agreement. She has been a staunch supporter of Israel and its war in Gaza, calling American college protesters “puppets of these radical Islamist organizations…that stand opposed to our ideology of freedom.”

But the Washington foreign policy establishment has lurched to such extremes over the past decade, that the once fairly banal positions held by former President Barack Obama — who did not view Ukraine as a core U.S. interest worth going to war over, and was wary of growing American military involvement that could provoke a proxy war with Russia — have now become cast as radical, even treasonous. In this context, Gabbard looks like a moderate. (1)

Obviously, anyone who is serving as the top intelligence official needs to be someone who is not going to leak like a sieve to foreign governments, especially to ones not on good terms with the US. I don’t know have serious the concerns many in the intelligence establishment really are. The DNI position a sensitive and important one which in practice exercises real power and influence.

But as Marcetic points out, some of the public criticisms of her as a security risk seem to be based on the idea that advocating any policy that might have looked preferable to Vladimir Putin or Bashar al-Assad makes her a security risk in the more technical sense of leaking secrets. But all of foreign policy involves decisions on how much to align with positions taken by various countries and how much to support stances that various countries oppose.

And if someone is actually selling secrets to Russia or China – and aren’t there always some someones like that? – then taking controversial positions on important foreign policy issues that align with the interest of perceived adversaries is probably not the most discrete way to avoid drawing attention from security investigators.

Ray McGovern in the last third of this interview talks about Tulsi Gabbard’s recent conversion to the concept of allowing warrantless wiretaps on US citizens. (2)

Note: Napolitano may favor a restrained foreign policy. And I’ve posted numerous of the interviews he’s done on foreign policy issues. But he also has a very conservative streak. And near the end of this video he defends an absurd, neo-Confederate arguments about states leaving the Union.

Notes:

(1) Marcetic, Branko (2025): Tulsi Gabbard vs. the War Party. Responsible Statecraft 01/13/2025. (Accessed: 2025-19-01).

(2) Ray McGovern : Tulsi Gabbard and Warrantless Spying. Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom YouTube channel 01/20/2025. (Accessed: 2025-19-01).