And true to form, yesterday morning the cowardly lions of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence roared away during former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing to become the next director of national intelligence.

Leading the charge against Gabbard on the Senate Intelligence Committee is ranking member Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia who, like his counterpart Adam Schiff (then serving as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence), spent four years lying to the American people about Donald Trump’s alleged connections to the Kremlin.

Warner’s bellyaching over Gabbard’s past praise of whistleblower Edward Snowden (who, even if one disagrees with his methods, did disclose very real abuses by the National Security Agency) captures the general, worshipful attitude Democrats have developed toward the permanent national security state in the years since Trump took the White House in 2016. National Security Democrats—usually but not always former CIA officers like the newly minted Democratic Senator from Michigan, Elise Slotkin—abhor the idea of actual oversight. They simply exist to further the objectives of the permanent national security bureaucracy.

The objections to Gabbard, then, come in two forms. The first is that she once met with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, ergo she is in league with a war criminal (the same smears have not been applied to Nancy Pelosi who met with Assad in 2007). And secondly, and more egregiously in the eyes of the NatSec Dems, Gabbard refuses to genuflect at the altar of the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies that comprise the “Intelligence Community” which she has been nominated to oversee.

Let’s first turn our attention to Syria.

Peter Ford, whom I spoke to this week, was the United Kingdom’s ambassador to Syria from 1999 to 2003 and later served as representative of the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from 2006 to 2015. 

He has courageously and at great cost to his reputation spoken out about the rank stupidity and recklessness of the West’s dirty war against Assad. The project, which has now tragically come to fruition, of isolating and ultimately overthrowing Assad has benefitted only a gang of Sunni Islamist militants with roots in organizations like al-Qaeda and al-Nusra.

Ford tells me that in his view Gabbard was justified in visiting Damascus because

keeping a closed mind on Assad was doing no service to the US. For many years Assad had pleaded with the West not to force him into the camp of Iran, with which secular Arabs like Assad felt no natural affinity. But that is exactly what we did. In the same way we forced Assad to become reliant on Russia when only the Russians came to his assistance when ISIS were literally at the gates of Damascus.

He continued,

From my time as British Ambassador, I knew the London-trained eye- doctor wanted to take his country in a pro-Western direction but we spurned the opportunity, making him mistrustful of the West. Personal diplomacy by people like Gabbard offered a way to get back on course. By 2019 none of Assad’s actions could remotely be described as anti-American unless resisting US openly acknowledged attempts at regime change could be categorized thus. Even the illegal presence of US troops in North East Syria was not actively opposed.

Gabbard’s other great sin is that of lèse-majesté. The national-security Blob protects its own. Warner’s entire career is proof of that. And the big problem with Gabbard is that she questions the prevailing wisdom—and such questioning will not do.

In a way, Warner and the NatSec Dems are right. The “threat” Gabbard poses to their prerogatives—namely, the ongoing series of worldwide covert regime change operations that redound to no one’s benefit but the Pentagon and IC’s budgets— is indeed a serious one—and one that sensible Americans should welcome. 

A manager of national intelligence need not check her brain at the door. As the former CIA head of Russia analysis George Beebe has written in these pages,

If the IC is to improve its analytic record, it needs to promote rather than penalize diverse thinking and employ rigorous methodology to explain instances where objective analysts might reasonably offer alternatives to mainstream opinion.

In an illuminating 1971 essay titled “The National Security Managers and the National Interest,” Richard Barnet observed that “National Security Managers exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and by interpreting the outside world for him.” The philosopher Hannah Arendt also observed around the same time that “the President, one is tempted to argue, allegedly the most powerful man in the most powerful country, is the only person in this country whose range of choices can be predetermined.” 

As Gabbard noted in her opening statement, a misuse of the IC’s power, as happened with the politicization of intelligence in the run up to Iraq, can result in catastrophe.

But NatSec Dems have fully embraced their role as the party of the permanent national security state. Warner and the rest know that the real threat Gabbard poses to their agenda is the threat that truth poses to power.

James W. Carden is a contributing editor to The American Conservative and a former adviser to the U.S. State Department.

Summing up this accusation, the political commentator Joe Walsh called Gabbard a Russian “asset” because “everything she has done and said over the past 10 years has been exactly what Russia would want her to say or do. So she’s either an asset or a dupe.” These efforts to cast Gabbard and other Americans as “assets or dupes” rely on conflating legitimate foreign policy dissent with the presence of (real or imagined) foreign espionage and propaganda on American soil.

The insinuation or blatant accusation equating legitimate dissent to traitorous behavior is an evergreen aspect of American foreign policy discourse. From the First World War until the present, this rhetorical sleight of hand has conflated actual foreign efforts at propaganda and espionage with unrelated domestic speech acts and associations related to foreign policy dissent. This tactic also depends upon the United States government’s virtually endless state of war or pseudo-war since 1941. This state of society has allowed those who support an activist foreign policy to apply the levers of legal or rhetorical pressure against those who dissent on American foreign policy. Throughout the 20th century, such accusations have narrowed the Overton window of foreign policy opinion and undermined the very democratic values that its users claim to defend.

This conflation has continuously served supporters of an interventionist foreign policy since American involvement in the First World War. In addition to a full suite of public and private attacks on American liberty, the federal government and its representatives routinely defamed American citizens who opposed entry into the war as enemy sympathizers. Even after the war, the 1920 Democratic presidential nominee, James M. Cox, referred to the Republicans as the “pro-German party,” and those who voted for his opponent, Warren Harding, as traitors. As a testament to their desire to move on from the war and its destruction of their liberties on the home front, Americans sent Harding to the White House in the biggest electoral blowout in nearly 50 years. Thanks to a comparatively modest foreign policy in the absence of significant great power competition during the interwar period, Americans were spared such attacks.

Yet they returned with a vengeance on the eve of the Second World War and, due to the demands of the country’s postwar foreign policy, remained in the bloodstream of American discourse, poised to flare up whenever beneficial to the protectors of American power abroad. The “Great Debate,” the so-called (and often acidic) public and legislative disputes that preceded American entry into the Second World War, took on a similar tone to those preceding the First World War. While not nearly as violent as its predecessor, the Great Debate nevertheless succeeded in casting doubt over those who opposed American entry into the war, presenting them as “dupes” or enemy agents by default.

Wayne S. Cole, a noted historian of the era, argued such tactics artificially stunted American opinion on the issue of war and peace and presaged the more widely known (and condemned) tactics of Joseph McCarthy. Cole noted in 1974 that “guilt by association, the charge that individuals were serving a dangerous and evil foreign totalitarian cause by not sufficiently voicing their opposition to that cause, were devastating in destroying the reputations and effectiveness” of those who opposed American entry into the war.

Due to the constant demands of an activist foreign policy, American society has yet to learn this lesson, whether the issue at hand was the First Iraq War, the Global War on Terror, the Second Iraq War, the Russo–Ukrainian war, or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. With all these foreign conflicts, defenders of an activist American foreign policy have not hesitated to tar their opponents as enemy “assets” or accuse them of repeating the “talking points” of a foreign power, all to the detriment of domestic discourse on the most pressing questions that face the American people.

This rhetorical tactic benefits from a condition of pseudo-war between the United States and a foreign power, a liminal space between peace and belligerence that allows the speaker to benefit from both. Whether it was the eve of American entry into the World Wars, the simmering tensions of the Cold War, the small and distant wars of the Global War on Terror, or the proxy war against the Russian Federation, supporters of an activist foreign policy can present their case with a sense of wartime urgency, while also hiding behind the U.S. government’s official status as a noncombatant. On the eve of its entry into both world wars, the United States government took overt and covert steps to wage a propaganda and public relations campaign against its citizens. Before the U.S. officially entered the Second World War in May of 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt conflated the presence of actual Nazi agents in the U.S. with legitimate dissent and asserted that said skepticism did not result from “wholesome political debates” but “through the clever schemes of foreign agents.”

Conversely, while on the campaign trail in November of 1940, FDR famously stated, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” FDR and the interventionists who supported his policies could have it both ways, claiming the moral authority of a country at war when it suited them, chiefly in the realm of discourse leveled at their noninterventionist opponents, while also retreating from their belligerent rhetoric, when necessary, by assuring the listener that the country was still at peace.

The Second World War created a rhetorical template on which believers in an activist foreign policy still draw. Supporters of the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine and general policy towards Russia can present their policies, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has done, as an existential defense of Europe while also assuring the American people that “we are not at war with Russia.” This gray area allows them to use the rhetorical tactics of a wartime state while still enjoying peace, but nevertheless sliding the Overton Window towards the former.

There may well be legitimate reasons to oppose the nomination of Gabbard and other individuals to the incoming Trump administration. Such reasons, however, ought to remain within the merits of an individual’s ability to perform the functions of their potential role. To do otherwise would remove already tenuous democratic mechanisms from American foreign policy by anathematizing constitutionally protected speech and legitimate foreign policy opinions. Such tactics not only undermine foreign policy discourse but also strike at the foundation of a democratic society where the people are supposed to be sovereign.

The insinuation or blatant accusation equating legitimate dissent to traitorous behavior is an evergreen aspect of American foreign policy discourse. From the First World War until the present, this rhetorical sleight of hand has conflated actual foreign efforts at propaganda and espionage with unrelated domestic speech acts and associations related to foreign policy dissent. This tactic also depends upon the United States government’s virtually endless state of war or pseudo-war since 1941. This state of society has allowed those who support an activist foreign policy to apply the levers of legal or rhetorical pressure against those who dissent on American foreign policy. Throughout the 20th century, such accusations have narrowed the Overton window of foreign policy opinion and undermined the very democratic values that its users claim to defend. 

This conflation has continuously served supporters of an interventionist foreign policy since American involvement in the First World War. In addition to a full suite of public and private attacks on American liberty, the federal government and its representatives routinely defamed American citizens who opposed entry into the war as enemy sympathizers. Even after the war, the 1920 Democratic presidential nominee, James M. Cox, referred to the Republicans as the “pro-German party,” and those who voted for his opponent, Warren Harding, as traitors. As a testament to their desire to move on from the war and its destruction of their liberties on the home front, Americans sent Harding to the White House in the biggest electoral blowout in nearly 50 years. Thanks to a comparatively modest foreign policy in the absence of significant great power competition during the interwar period, Americans were spared such attacks. 

Yet they returned with a vengeance on the eve of the Second World War and, due to the demands of the country’s postwar foreign policy, remained in the bloodstream of American discourse, poised to flare up whenever beneficial to the protectors of American power abroad. The “Great Debate,” the so-called (and often acidic) public and legislative disputes that preceded American entry into the Second World War, took on a similar tone to those preceding the First World War. While not nearly as violent as its predecessor, the Great Debate nevertheless succeeded in casting doubt over those who opposed American entry into the war, presenting them as “dupes” or enemy agents by default.

Wayne S. Cole, a noted historian of the era, argued such tactics artificially stunted American opinion on the issue of war and peace and presaged the more widely known (and condemned) tactics of Joseph McCarthy. Cole noted in 1974 that “guilt by association, the charge that individuals were serving a dangerous and evil foreign totalitarian cause by not sufficiently voicing their opposition to that cause, were devastating in destroying the reputations and effectiveness” of those who opposed American entry into the war.

Due to the constant demands of an activist foreign policy, American society has yet to learn this lesson, whether the issue at hand was the First Iraq War, the Global War on Terror, the Second Iraq War, the Russo–Ukrainian war, or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. With all these foreign conflicts, defenders of an activist American foreign policy have not hesitated to tar their opponents as enemy “assets” or accuse them of repeating the “talking points” of a foreign power, all to the detriment of domestic discourse on the most pressing questions that face the American people. 

This rhetorical tactic benefits from a condition of pseudo-war between the United States and a foreign power, a liminal space between peace and belligerence that allows the speaker to benefit from both. Whether it was the eve of American entry into the World Wars, the simmering tensions of the Cold War, the small and distant wars of the Global War on Terror, or the proxy war against the Russian Federation, supporters of an activist foreign policy can present their case with a sense of wartime urgency, while also hiding behind the U.S. government’s official status as a noncombatant. On the eve of its entry into both world wars, the United States government took overt and covert steps to wage a propaganda and public relations campaign against its citizens. Before the U.S. officially entered the Second World War in May of 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt conflated the presence of actual Nazi agents in the U.S. with legitimate dissent and asserted that said skepticism did not result from “wholesome political debates” but “through the clever schemes of foreign agents.”

Conversely, while on the campaign trail in November of 1940, FDR famously stated, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” FDR and the interventionists who supported his policies could have it both ways, claiming the moral authority of a country at war when it suited them, chiefly in the realm of discourse leveled at their noninterventionist opponents, while also retreating from their belligerent rhetoric, when necessary, by assuring the listener that the country was still at peace.

The Second World War created a rhetorical template on which believers in an activist foreign policy still draw. Supporters of the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine and general policy towards Russia can present their policies, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has done, as an existential defense of Europe while also assuring the American people that “we are not at war with Russia.” This gray area allows them to use the rhetorical tactics of a wartime state while still enjoying peace, but nevertheless sliding the Overton Window towards the former.

There may well be legitimate reasons to oppose the nomination of Gabbard and other individuals to the incoming Trump administration. Such reasons, however, ought to remain within the merits of an individual’s ability to perform the functions of their potential role. To do otherwise would remove already tenuous democratic mechanisms from American foreign policy by anathematizing constitutionally protected speech and legitimate foreign policy opinions. Such tactics not only undermine foreign policy discourse but also strike at the foundation of a democratic society where the people are supposed to be sovereign.   

Brandan P. Buck is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute.