The ‘Foreign Asset’ Smear Is Antidemocratic

“Yes. There’s no question. I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.” Such was the incendiary accusation that Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) leveled at the former congresswoman for Hawaii and current Trump administration nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Schultz’s accusation was not a one-off, but has been repeated by other elected officials and individuals who support the foreign policy status quo. 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.   

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