Brett Johnsen via AP
Former U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard could be the next director of national intelligence.
Donald Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence has predictably divided America’s elected officials and media, but that understates the breadth of her support. Rossiya-1, a Russian state television channel, has called her a “comrade,” while Komsomolskaya Pravda and other Russian papers have been similarly effusive in their praise. Indeed, unlike the American press, Russian media seem uniformly enthusiastic about Trump’s pick.
This presents an opportunity only Cold War nostalgiacs could dismiss. Why doesn’t Trump work out a deal with Vladimir Putin to put Gabbard in charge of both nations’ intelligence agencies? As our agencies made very clear when we correctly told the world that Putin was about to invade Ukraine, we already know Russia’s secrets, so we would lose nothing by such an arrangement. But consider the advantages of having Russia know our secrets, not to mention that in the fog of confusion such a melding would create, each nation could routinely blame the other for its own questionable operations. East-West win-win!
It’s no wonder that Russia regards Gabbard as virtually one of their own. She has famously blamed the West, not Putin, for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, presumably due to the enticements that Western institutions like the European Union dangled before Ukrainians. (This is a little like holding the Treaty of Versailles responsible for Hitler’s crimes.) She has repeated Russian media’s utterly unsubstantiated claims that the U.S. had secret bioweapons facilities in Ukraine, and that it was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. She also rushed to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s side during that country’s civil war, despite his killing of hundreds of his fellow Syrians with poison gas.
By linking the secret governmental agencies of the U.S. and Russia, Gabbard could play a crucial role in enabling Trump not only to bolster his fellow autocrats, but also to crack down on his domestic enemies with a cloak of deniability that could come from sharing assets with the Russians, who have successfully whacked dissident democrats beyond their nation’s borders. In that sense, Tulsi’s leadership of both nations’ agencies would be a twofer (not to mention, by having Putin pick up half her salary, a valuable cost savings at a time when a record federal deficit looms).
In short, a 21st-century version of détente. Who could ask for anything more?
