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By Arta Moeini and Christopher Mott
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History repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce, as Karl Marx famously said. Perhaps nothing bears this maxim out more than the nomination of former Democratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to the position of Director of National Intelligence coinciding with the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime, which catapulted the Syrian civil war back into U.S. national consciousness.
Much of the mainstream media rejoiced as jihadists and former Al Qaeda terrorists, who have rebranded yet again as Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), overran Syrian Army positions and captured much of the country, including its capital Damascus, in mere days. Channeling a permanent sentiment in Washington at least since 2011, many pundits celebrated Assad's fall as the triumph of freedom and a step towards democracy. Others happily bought into the Western-friendly image that the Syrian opposition—at HTS leader Muhammad al-Joulani's direction—wants to sell foreign audiences, reviving the "moderate rebels" trope and even labeling HTS "diversity-friendly jihadists."
All this media frenzy unfolds alongside president-elect Donald Trump's courageous nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran and U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel, to lead the U.S. intelligence community. Predictably, the Beltway reacted with outrage and anonymous sabotage of her looming confirmation. Ostensibly, these attacks stem from Gabbard's controversial decision to meet with Assad (whom she has called "a brutal dictator") and explore a diplomatic solution to the Syrian conflict. But in reality, she became persona non grata due to her defiant and unapologetic criticism of U.S. foreign policy, especially the tendency of its hyper-interventionism and military-first, diplomacy-last approach to strategic competitors to produce endless foreign wars.
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This hysterical reaction to the Gabbard nomination, juxtaposed with the description of the HTS terrorists as freedom fighters, reveals that the failed bipartisan consensus on Assad and the Syrian civil war remains unrepentant and unchanged. This is alarming for two reasons. First, Syria is only a small thread in a larger web of permanent policies predicated on U.S. primacy and exceptionalism. Second, it shows the national security establishment is trapped in failed Manichaean narratives from a bygone era—stubbornly refusing to learn from its errors.
Despite 9/11 and the countless Americans killed by Salafi Jihadists, there has been no honest reckoning of our disastrous policy of using militant Islamist groups like HTS to fight adversaries. Such reckless actions weaken U.S. foreign policy and show U.S. policymaking is plagued by short-sightedness and an absence of strategic empathy—causing grand delusions and great tragedies.
When protests erupted against Assad in 2011, Western leaders celebrated the impending dawn of liberalism or Jeffersonian democracy for the Syrian people. Their idealism ignored the country's long-standing colonial scars and sectarian divisions while exploiting external actors, including Al Qaeda and its newer offshoots unleashed by the Global War on Terror. Then-assistant to the secretary of state Jake Sullivan even claimed in 2012 that Al Qaeda "is on our side in Syria."
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In 2014, then-vice president Joe Biden revealed how U.S. allies in the region like Turkey and the UAE armed Al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda, and other extremist jihadist elements to fuel "a proxy Sunni-Shia war." Years later, the New York Times disclosed active U.S. involvement in Syria as part of Operation Timber Sycamore, the most expensive arming and training program in CIA history. In theory, the program was supposed to identify and train the "moderate rebels"; in practice, it trained and weaponized jihadists. This resulted in farcical episodes of various U.S.-backed rebels fighting each other—with the CIA and the Pentagon supporting different rebel groups.
Gabbard dissented from this contrived consensus on Syria, actively resisting the false narratives of the permanent national security bureaucracy. A critic of "regime change wars," she warned of the violence and chaos that could follow Assad's ouster. While emphasizing Washington's minimal interests in Syria and that the secular and transactional Assad was "not the enemy of the United States," Gabbard argued that Assad was the lesser of two evils compared with the global threat that stateless Islamist extremist networks posed.
Like Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, Assad will be remembered as a thug who left his country on the brink of state failure. But as the armed Islamist opposition now moves to consolidate power in Syria, it is hard to overstate the importance of both Gabbard's and Donald Trump's warnings about the precarious nature of the Syrian conflict and the need for the U.S. to steer clear.
Tulsi Gabbard's nomination is also symbolically powerful. The former congresswoman was a target for character assassination and neo-McCarthyism by those who reflexively support endless interventionism and attempt to cancel dissenting views. Indeed, she was the victim of a "Russiagate" conspiracy theory before Trump was. Her selection thus signals a turning of the page—vindicating all those who object to a mindlessly hawkish U.S. foreign policy. By standing up to a manufactured narrative about a foreign country, Gabbard spoke truth to power only to be ostracized for it and even secretly placed on the government's terror watch list.
Ultimately, Gabbard and many veterans of the War on Terror share a sense of having been betrayed and lied to, as well as a healthy skepticism of war and military interventionism abroad. That president-elect Trump has chosen to empower many such veterans scarred by the high toll of war—like Gabbard, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth—by appointing them to key posts signals that the incoming administration will focus on prudent realism to decide America's interests and affirm a strong and capable military as an option of last resort.
At a time of historic public distrust of our nation's key institutions, a leader like Gabbard, who pushes the intelligence community to seek and speak the truth, can only strengthen U.S. security. With a well-known Islamist—once targeted by a $10 million U.S. bounty—now leading Syria, America needs leaders willing to buck a failed bipartisan consensus about Washington's role in the world if it is to overcome the challenges of a post-unipolar order.
Dr. Arta Moeini is Managing Director at The American Institute for Peace & Diplomacy (IPD-USA), a scholar of U.S. grand strategy, and the founding editor of AGON magazine. X: @Artamoeini.
Dr. Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at IPD-USA and a former researcher and desk officer at the U.S. State Department. X: @ChrisDMott.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
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