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Tulsi Gabbard betrays the antiwar cause

March 20, 2026

Tulsi Gabbard was my hero. Although I am registered as a Republican, as a noninterventionist I was thrilled when Gabbard ran for president in 2019 as the Democratic Party’s primary antiwar candidate. At the time, she was a U.S. House member and a decorated Hawaii Army National Guard veteran of the Iraq War.

That November, Hillary Clinton charged, “She’s the Russians’ favorite candidate,” and Moscow was “grooming her to be the third-party candidate.”

“This is outrageous and offensive on so many levels,” Gabbard responded, when asked on “The View” about Clinton’s attack. “I’ve served as a member of Congress now for almost seven years, receiving high-level security and national intelligence briefings,” while on the Foreign Affairs, Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. Clinton “continued this legacy of being the world’s police around the world, and waged wars costing the lives of thousands of my brothers and sisters in uniform.”

Gabbard lost the nomination to Joe Biden, who became president despite having supported many wars across his career.

In 2024, Gabbard became a Republican and endorsed antiwar candidate Donald Trump. A video still on her own YouTube feed features him introducing her at an October 22 rally, two weeks before the election. She charged Democratic nominee Kamala Harris with being “pro-war” and for “shamelessly” embracing “the endorsement of warmongers like Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, and others who care more about power and feeding the military industrial complex than they do about you.”

When Trump was re-elected, he appointed her the director of national intelligence. On March 25, 2025, she testified before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.”

On June 13, Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, bombing military and nuclear facilities and killing numerous leaders. On June 17, aboard Air Force One, Trump was asked about Gabbard’s statement. “I don’t care what she said,” he replied. “I think they were very close to having one,” meaning a nuclear weapon.

On June 22, Trump bombed the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan Iranian nuclear sites, claiming they were “obliterated,” a word he repeatedly has used.

On Feb. 28 this year, he and Israel began the ongoing Iran war, attacking thousands of sites. On March 17, Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and Gabbard’s chief of staff, resigned in protest against the war. He is a former Green Beret, with 11 combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. His wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologist, was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in 2019. In his resignation letter, Kent urged Trump, “You can reverse course and chart a new path for our nation.”

Gabbard should have followed Kent and resigned in protest.

The next day, March 18, Gabbard again testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., asked if there remained “an imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no?”

“Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president,” she prevaricated. Even though it’s actually her job to give Congress – whose members represent the American people – a straight answer.

She has become Hillary Clinton, a regime sycophant who, in Gabbard’s own words, is potentially sacrificing the “lives of thousands of my brothers and sisters in uniform,” or now their sons and daughters, “being the world’s police.”

What a disappointment.

John Seiler is on the SCNG Editorial Board and blogs on the war at johnseiler.substack.com

Orange County Register

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Tulsi Gabbard betrays the antiwar cause

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