Is Tulsi Gabbard Right About Syria? She’s Not Wrong.

Peter Harris

Politics, Americas

Washington should not bother to claim to want Assad gone if it is unwilling to do anything to make it happen.

Is Tulsi Gabbard an “apologist” for the Syrian regime? How about a “stooge” of the Kremlin? These are just some of the questions being asked of the congresswoman from Hawaii as she bids to become the Democratic nominee for president, but they are entirely the wrong ones. Media outlets and Gabbard’s political rivals should, instead, consider the arguments that have led this veteran of the Iraq War to recommend against removing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from power. Better yet, they could explain how an alternative set of policies would promote U.S. interests and improve the lot of the long-suffering Syrian people.

Of course, it is fair to ask any presidential hopeful why they would agree to meet with a murderous despot like Assad, as Gabbard did in January 2017. It is also reasonable to question whether Gabbard’s rejection of military interventions as a tool of statecraft is the right approach to U.S. foreign policy (she once tried to legislate against regime change in Syria). But it is unhelpful at best to insinuate that Gabbard’s foreign-policy positions are cynical or anti-American. They are neither.

Gabbard’s approach to Syria is built upon two core beliefs about U.S. foreign policy. First, the United States must leave behind its recent history of engineering the downfall of foreign regimes. Second, the U.S. military’s top priority should be to eliminate terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. From these two premises, a third foundation of Gabbard’s foreign policy can be inferred: that the United States must sometimes tolerate the existence of brutal foreign governments, especially if they share a common interest in fighting the same terrorist groups as America.

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