On Monday, former House Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-HI, supported Donald Trump for president and became one of his spokesmen during the campaign. This is bad news: it confirms Trump’s tilt toward the dangerous isolationist movement that has long been at work in Republican politics.
Gabbard’s opposition to helping Ukraine win its long defensive war against Vladimir Putin’s massacre of civilians and annexation of Ukraine It is territory is just the latest in its long-standing efforts to advance Policies that work in Putin’s favor. 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 end peaceful pro-democracy protests, Gabbard began do interviews asserting that the United States should take no action against Assad’s genocidal violence, including its use of chemical weapons.
She and others like her were instrumental in the pivotal turning point of August 2013. As I explain in my book, A League of Democracies, French President François Hollande said that the strikes against Assad’s air force Action was needed to address violations of international law. Hollande sought the support of British Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama. Several US foreign policy leaders at the time, such as Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, wanted a Western coalition to go further and establish a no-fly zone to protect Syrian cities from Assad’s wanton slaughter. But Gabbard, like Edward Milliband in the British Parliament, led the effort to prevent any Western military response to the genocide in Syria. She supported Assad’s lie that of Assad the enemies were mainly “terrorists” (Actually, Assad helped create ISIS so he could peddle the lie that Gabbard so credulously believed).
The results of this inaction: Assad has razed large portions of major Syrian cities, killed more than 300,000 non-combatantsand has driven at least six million Syrians to flee — including millions who have crossed into Turkey and Europe — all with Gabbard’s continued support. The devastation in Syria has in turn contributed to the migrant crisis in Europe, the far-right backlash, Brexit, and Turkey’s estrangement from its NATO allies, all of which ultimately helped Putin. Islamic State took advantage of power vacuum and wreaked havoc across northern Syria and northern Iraq. This ultimately forced Obama to form a U.S.-led coalition with the Syrian Kurds, requiring a sustained U.S. presence on the ground in Syria and lengthy bombing campaigns to drive ISIS out of Raqqa and Mosul — both of which looked like Gaza today when the campaign began. against ISIS was finished.
Putin was emboldened by the failure of NATO countries 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 Donbass region to trigger a civil war and secession there. The following year, sensing the West’s weakness, Putin also entered the Syrian civil war on Assad’s sideHe claimed his forces were fighting Sunni Muslim militants or terrorists. That was a lie: Most of the airstrikes were launched from Russia’s expanded air base in Syria. Schools, hospitals and civilian housing targeted in Sunni areas – thus helping to complete the genocide.
Getting away with it in Syria finally taught Putin that he could use the same scorched-earth strategy against the rest of Ukraine. The tide turned against the cause of democracy and human rights in late 2013, with democracy on the verge of being undermined. backing down in the face of the rise of autocracies worldwide since then. Gabbard has contributed to this series of disasters, rapprochement with Assad and the Putin regime and, in recent years, spread Russian propaganda on far-right websites. The costs to Syria, Iraq, Ukraine and NATO are incalculable.
Gabbard’s response to this was, predictably, to defend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, shocking even Sean HannityIt didn’t matter to Gabbard that in 1991 the United States and the United Kingdom 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 Conspiracy theory discredited She claimed 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 US support.
It is difficult to trace the roots of Gabbard’s delusions. After serving in KuwaitHer opposition to any action against Assad — even if it were only from the air — seemed to stem from a belief that the United States should never risk putting soldiers in harm’s way in efforts to promote democracy. She failed to grasp the obvious: that such a cowardly policy only sends a message of weakness to leaders like Putin and Chinese Premier Xi. practically inviting them to help destroy pro-democracy movements everywhere – from Venezuela and Sudan to Hong Kong and Myanmar. Notably, Gabbard’s political action committee’s largest donor in 2021 was Sharon Tennison, Putin Apologist.
If Gabbard convinces Trump to support this isolationist policy of appeasing the dictator in a second term, the consequences could be even worse than in 2013. If Russia succeeds in retaining a large part of southeastern Ukraine in addition to the Donbass and Crimea, Xi’s regime will surely be encouraged to invade Taiwan, The United States could be drawn into another major war. This time, the forces defending democracy and human rights could suffer a decisive defeat, leading to tyranny in much of the world by mid-century.
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