On Monday, former Democratic House member Tulsi Gabbard, D-HI, endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency and became one of his surrogates on the campaign trail. This is bad news: it confirms Trump’s tilt towards the dangerous isolationist movement at work in Republican politics for a long time now.
Gabbard’s opposition to helping Ukraine win its long-suffering defensive war against Vladimir Putin’s slaughter of civilians and annexation of its territory is only the latest installment in her longtime efforts to advance policies that play into Putin’s hands. Immediately after entering Congress in 2013, just months after Syrian tyrant Bashir al-Assad and his Hezbollah allies began murdering hundreds of thousands of Syrians to stop peaceful pro-democracy protests, Gabbard started doing interviews arguing that the U.S. should take no action against Assad’s genocidal violence, including his use of chemical weapons.
She and others like her were influential at the crucial turning point in August 2013. As I explain in my book, A League of Democracies, French President François Hollande argued that strikes on Assad’s air force were needed in response to his violations of international law. Hollande sought support from British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama. Several American foreign policy leaders at the time, like Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, wanted a Western coalition to go further and establish a no-fly zone to protect Syria’s cities from Assad’s wanton slaughter. But Gabbard, like Edward Milliband in the UK Parliament, led the effort to stop any Western military response to genocide in Syria. She supported Assad’s lie that Assad’s enemies were mostly “terrorists” (in fact, Assad helped to create ISIS so he could peddle the lie that Gabbard so gullibly believed).
The results of this inaction: Assad leveled large portions of major Syrian cities, killed over 300,000 non-combatants, and drove at least six million Syrians to flee – including millions who entered Turkey and Europe – all with Gabbard’s continued support. The devastation in Syria contributed in turn to the European migrant crisis, right-wing nativist backlashes, Brexit, and Turkey’s alienation from its NATO allies, all of which ultimately helped Putin. ISIS rose in the power vacuum and wreaked havoc all across northern Syria and northern Iraq. This eventually forced Obama to form a US-led coalition with Syrian Kurds, requiring a continuing American presence on the ground in Syria, and long campaigns of bombardment to oust ISIS from Raqqa and Mosul – which both looked like Gaza today when the campaign against ISIS was done.
Putin was emboldened by the failure of NATO nations to act against Assad in 2013, even after he crossed the “chemical red line.” So when Ukrainians rose up against their own dictator (a Putin puppet), just as the Syrians had done during the Arab Spring, Putin attacked Ukraine in response. The Russian president annexed Crimea and established proxy forces in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region to gin up civil war and secession there. The next year, sensing Western weakness, Putin also entered the Syrian civil war on Assad’s side. He said that his forces were battling Sunni Muslim militants or terrorists. That was a lie: most of the air strikes launched from Russia’s expanded airbase in Syria targeted schools, hospitals, and civilian housing in Sunni areas – helping to complete the genocide.
Getting away with this scot-free in Syria ultimately taught Putin that he could use the same scorched-earth mass casualty strategy against the rest of Ukraine. The tide turned against the cause of democracy and human rights in late 2013, democracy has been on the retreat against rising autocracies around the world ever since. Gabbard contributed to this series of disasters, frequently cozying up to Assad and to Putin’s regime and, in recent years, spreading Russian propaganda on fringe far-right sites. The costs for Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, and the NATO alliance are beyond calculation.
Gabbard’s reaction to this was, predictably, to defend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, shocking even Sean Hannity. It did not matter to Gabbard that, in 1991, the US and UK had convinced Ukraine to hand over its old Soviet-era nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation on the promise that Russia would respect Ukraine’s borders. Instead, she supported the discredited conspiracy theory that the US was helping Ukraine create biological weapons to use against Russian forces. Now, she wants us to let Putin succeed in Ukraine by cutting off American support.
It is difficult to trace the roots of Gabbard’s delusions. After serving in Kuwait, her opposition to any action against Assad – even if it were only from the air – seemed to flow from a belief that the US should never risk any soldiers on democracy-promotion efforts. She did not grasp the obvious, namely that such a policy of cowardice only telegraphs weakness to leaders like Putin and Chinese Premier Xi, virtually inviting them to help destroy pro-democracy movements anywhere – from Venezuela and Sudan to Hong Kong and Myanmar. Notably, the biggest donor to Gabbard’s political action committee in 2021 was Putin apologist Sharon Tennison.
If Gabbard convinces Trump to back this isolationist policy of dictator appeasement in a second term, the consequences could be even worse than in 2013. If Russia succeeds in hanging on to much of Ukraine’s southeast in addition to the Donbas and Crimea, Xi’s regime will surely be emboldened to invade Taiwan, possibly dragging the US into a huge new war. This time, the forces defending the causes of democracy and human rights may suffer decisive defeat, leading to tyranny across much of the world by mid-century.
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