The Tulsi Gabbard Conundrum: What to do when a politician takes the wrong road to the right answer?

The recent crisis in Iran has launched foreign policy towards the forefront of the 2020 Democratic primary. After having been largely swept under the rug in the early stages of the process, the first half hour of the most recent debate was dedicated to the candidates’ qualifications to serve as Commander-in-Chief (see more on this debate from Benchmark Politics here).

One voice was noticeably absent from the stage last week: Hawai’i Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, the only Democratic candidate to center foreign policy as the focal point of her campaign.

Until circumstances dictated otherwise, the media’s framing of the campaign as a head-on collision between moderate Democrats and a rising, progressive tide led by Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, did not help drag foreign policy into the discussion. Since many of the clear divides between the center and the left lanes occur on domestic issues, foreign policy has been relegated to occasional empty grandstanding directed at the President.

Joe Biden, has the traditional “foreign policy experience” credential, a designation that in past elections might have meant that he would want to pivot the discussion toward that topic. However, he has instead resorted to only the clichéd “steady hand guiding America’s interests abroad” as opposed to seriously confronting his vote in favor of the Iraq War and his role in a few failures of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

Despite his best efforts, and some important leadership on crucial international issues such as defunding the War in Yemen, Bernie Sanders remains a domestic policy candidate at heart.

What is important about Gabbard’s campaign is that she is not a Bidenesque, establishment candidate who voters might consider to be “able and willing to serve as Commander in Chief on Day One” (see Hillary Clinton in 2008 and 2016, John McCain in 2008 or John Kerry in 2004). Rather, Gabbard has made her central argument a challenge of US foreign policy orthodoxy, a phenomenon that we have not seen often in the post 9/11 world. Most other candidates who have criticized the role that the US plays in the world (for example Sanders, Ron Paul, and even Donald Trump) have done so as a side note to a dramatic overhaul in domestic affairs, or as a way to tie foreign affairs to their larger vision for America.

It is unsurprising that any serious Presidential candidate hoping to overturn the status quo has looked mostly to do so on economic or cultural terms. It appears as if there is no easier way to commit political suicide in today’s world than to challenge certain elements of American foreign policy heterodoxy.

In order to illustrate this point, look no further than the treatment of the so-called “Squad” since their arrivals in Washington, DC 12 months ago.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the apparent face of the progressive insurgency, has focused mostly on economic and socio-cultural reform. She has been largely embraced by the national mainstream media, appearing on 60 minutes and being named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2019.

On the contrary, her fellow freshman representative Ilhan Omar has centered much of her “resistance” around combatting the foreign policy action of not only Trump but also all of his modern-era predecessors, including Democrats. Unlike AOC, Omar has not found herself at all welcomed into the liberal political and media elite, but has instead repeatedly found herself under fire from within her own party for what were legitimate critiques of, among other things, the United States’ relationship with Israel. This is not to suggest that AOC has received a warm welcome, but she has not faced the same level of blowback as her colleague from Minnesota. The Omar example is just one in a long line of a history of US politicians being sidelined for questioning what Obama advisor Ben Rhodes dubbed as “the blob”, or the established way of thinking on foreign policy.

Gabbard herself was one lauded as a “rising star” within the party, at least until it became apparent that she would stand against the typical foreign policy consensus. This is what makes Gabbard’s campaign so impressive. She is not a legitimate threat to win the nomination, but she has remained relevant when compared to other minor candidates despite a lack of help from the Democratic apparatus and a number of enemies within the party. Her campaign, currently polling at almost two percent nationally, has even outlasted those of Senators from each of the country’s two largest states: Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Kamala Harris of California.

Gabbard has looked to validate her foreign policy vision on the credentials of running as a veteran, using her voice to forcefully argue against the wastefulness of US wars, both monetarily and in terms of lives lost. In a city and country unhealthily obsessed with war and flexing military might, Gabbard is a breath of fresh air.

While Gabbard has not bought into the military industrial complex, she has taken part in another DC tradition: bipartisanship. While some of the right wing alliances she has made are problematic to say the least (notably those with Steve Bannon and David Duke), her campaign has also brought Republican and independent voters in instead of typical Democrats. Ironically enough, it is the same entities that have built up candidates like Biden and Amy Klobuchar for their ability to reach “across the aisle” who have most ignored or discredited Gabbard’s ability to find real common ground with Republicans instead of compromising her ideals for the sake of what can best be described as incremental progress.

Gabbard has found support from the pro-Trump wing of America’s right on issues ranging from ending America’s forever wars to supporting Julain Assange to looking to ease instead of heighten tensions with Russia. In fact, a recent University of New Hampshire poll of the state’s primary shows that Gabbard had the support of 28% of respondents who identified as Republican, 7% of independents and only 2% of Democrats.

Beyond her questionable allies, not everything about the Hawai’i representative’s history with foreign policy is positive. She is not as ardently and unapologetically pro-Israel as most in Congress, but she is not exactly a supporter of Palestinian rights, either. The list of authoritarian dictators who she has praised include, in addition to Assad, Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India.

Maintaining a positive non-interventionist foreign policy does mean having to hold your nose and meet with some disagreeable world leaders in an attempt to avoid a worst-case scenario. It should not mean ignoring human rights abuses and even supporting the perpetrators of those abuses.

Most notably, many of Gabbard’s foreign policy opinions seem to be rooted in anti-Muslim animus. As Branko Marcetic illustrated in a 2017 piece for Jacobin, Gabbard may oppose American imperialism, she is not anti-war. While she opposes regime change wars, she has admitted to being a lot more hawkish when it comes to combatting Islamic terrorism. She has supported Russia’s actions in Syria, refused to condemn Modi for his violence against Muslims in Kashmir, and voted against the US increasing the level of Syrian refugees allowed in.

Still, the bottom line remains: Gabbard is one of only a handful of American politicians who is courageous enough to stand up to one of the most egregious bipartisan mistakes of the past generation (the militarization of American foreign policy) and to seriously confront the questions concerning America’s role in the world.

So, the question arises: What to do about a candidate who takes the wrong road to the right answer?

Before getting further into this question, it must be acknowledged that the left has been forced to confront this issue for the past few years, as some thinkers on that side of the spectrum have mused about the possibility that Donald Trump and his allies may have represented the best chance to end America’s “forever wars” .

For all of Trump’s bluster about restructuring US foreign policy, he has not gotten the country out of any wars and has flirted with getting embroiled into a new one with Iran. The “anti-war” actions that Trump has taken — notably his withdrawal of American forces from Northern Syria — have been hastily thought out and poorly executed.

The fact that Trump had John Bolton as his National Security Advisor, no matter for how long, should be evidence enough that Trump was never committed to carrying out a non-interventionist foreign policy. As with everything else in Trump’s world, his foreign policy is unprincipled, making it clear that could never be a trustworthy ally for dovish Democrats.

While some Republicans who have Trump’s ear, notably Tucker Carlson, are more committed to decreasing America’s military footprint overseas, they too are not natural allies. For one, their anti-interventionist instinct seems entirely to come out of racist beliefs. For them, imperialism and intervention is not bad because of America’s history of being anything but a force for good, but rather that not even the heroic American military cannot civilize the savages of, say, Iraq. It is not worth it to risk American lives in order to reach an unattainable goal.

Secondly, this group of people hold such abominable views on other issues that any alliance with them appears almost counter-productive by legitimizing them and their views on topics such as immigration, race and social welfare. While allowing different voices into any movement is important, it is difficult to justify a partnership with this particular group of Trump cheerleaders.

Tulsi Gabbard presents a wholly different kind of case, however. While she has a history of troubling views on LGBTQ rights, since arriving in Congress, she has apologized and backed up her words with a solid voting record. She supports a number of traditionally progressive proposals on domestic issues.

So, how should progressive-leaning Democrats, especially those who prioritize foreign policy reforms, treat Gabbard’s candidacy?

So far, neither side of the intra-party Democratic divide has taken the correct approach. The mainstream establishment has accused her of being a Russian asset and of planning to run as a third party spoiler. The more fringe elements of the party (that support her) have almost uniformly refused to acknowledge that her foreign policy is often, like Trump’s, nationalism masked in anti-interventionism.

The center-left has elevated Gabbard in the public eye (against their own goals) while also ignoring or discrediting her ideas on the basis that she has some unconventional views. The further left wing of the party has made her even more unpalatable to the general public by defending her at all costs, even when her stances are in opposition to progressive goals.

Despite her shortcomings, it is increasingly clear that the Democratic establishment aims to sideline Gabbard primarily because she challenges entrenched foreign policy views. The Congresswoman is clearly one of the most interesting players in the American political world right now, and, more significantly, she presents herself as a potential leader for an increasingly likely coalition between progressive and libertarian voices on a non-interventionist foreign policy.

Gabbard’s voice must be taken seriously. Treating her candidacy and her positions with the requisite nuance means that we can honestly engage with her thought-provoking worldview and potentially make inroads towards ending America’s forever wars.

The establishment has erred greatly in treating Gabbard as an enemy; doing so risks losing anti-war voters, especially if Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee. Her standing as a candidate with a campaign on life support gives leftists an opening; it means that anti-interventionist Democrats, who are presumably supporting Bernie Sanders, can now focus on her ideas, and not her person, her troubling views, or the institutions that have been trying to slow her down.