Tulsi Gabbard delights in provocation

THERE IS SOMETHINGNATODNCDNC enigmatic and head-turning about Tulsi Gabbard. It is not just a matter of first impressions: her silver-striped hair (reminiscent of Rogue, a character from “X-Men”); intense eye contact; go-to greeting—“Aloha”—delivered in a husky voice. It is also her convictions. Some are batty enough to make a right-thinking person squirm. Ms Gabbard can sound cheerily woo-woo (“There is no force more powerful than love”) or ominously so (“The forces of darkness are filled with power and money”). It is hard to know precisely what to make of her, except that she dislikes foreign wars and delights in confounding expectations. So much so that on occasion she sounds like a conspiracy theorist. She prefers the term “free-thinker”.This enigmatic quality is not new. Back in 2017, when Ms Gabbard was still a congresswoman and the subject of a profile, that magazine asked: “What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?” The answer might not have mattered much then. Now it may, hugely, for America’s national security and for wars from Gaza to Syria to Ukraine. Donald Trump has nominated her to be his , whose job it is to oversee 18 spy agencies. If confirmed by the next Republican-controlled Senate, she will have Mr Trump’s ear every day at his intelligence briefing.Democrats have taken to calling Ms Gabbard, aged 43, a Russian asset. There is no evidence for this, yet the charge—however baseless—underlines their discomfort with her nomination. Ms Gabbard, disillusioned by her service in the Iraq war, distrusts American entanglements abroad: what she calls “regime-change wars”. Yet her isolationism often veers into Russophilia.She has excused Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a justified response to ’s expansion. In 2017 she flew to Damascus to meet Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s now-deposed dictator who recently fled to Moscow, and said she was “sceptical” that he had used chemical weapons against his own people (despite evidence that he had). Russian television presenters call her “comrade” and “our girlfriend”. Adam Schiff, an incoming Democratic senator from California, warns that if American allies “don’t trust the head of our intelligence agencies, they’ll stop sharing information with us”.Before Ms Gabbard started calling the Democratic Party an “elitist cabal of warmongers”, she belonged to it, and was even one of its rising stars. Born in American Samoa to a Samoan father and white mother, Ms Gabbard moved to Hawaii as a child, where she was largely homeschooled. At 21 she dropped out of community college and won a seat in Hawaii’s state legislature. Then came deployments with the National Guard in Iraq and Kuwait, where she served in the medical and police units. In 2012 she won election to Congress, becoming its first Hindu member. called her an “embodiment of the Obama era, with its…explosion of cultural diversity” and staged a photoshoot of her surfing. The Democratic National Committee () gave her a leadership post.Her disaffection with the party crystallised during the presidential primary in 2016. Ms Gabbard supported Bernie Sanders. She derided Hillary Clinton as a military interventionist and faulted her, as Mr Obama’s secretary of state, for the chaos that followed Muammar Qaddafi’s overthrow in Libya. Ms Gabbard quit the ; donors started to keep their distance. Then in 2020 she left Congress to seek the Democratic presidential nomination herself as a longshot anti-establishment candidate. That year she filed a defamation lawsuit (which she later dropped) against Mrs Clinton, for calling her a Russian plant.Mr Trump’s win in 2016, meanwhile, piqued her curiosity about the other side. She criticised the “neocon war hawks” in his first administration but found common cause with Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, Mr Trump’s cheerleaders and fellow isolationists. Eager to have on a Democratic apostate, Fox News hired her as a talking head.If anti-interventionism is one throughline of her career, the other is her support for Hindu nationalism, an ideology that privileges Hindu religion and culture in India. This preoccupation is a little curious—Ms Gabbard is a Hindu but she has no Indian heritage. Nevertheless she has met Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu-nationalist prime minister, several times. While in Congress she opposed a resolution condemning religiously motivated violence against Muslims and Christians in India. Hindutva ideology, she has said, is simply about “expressing pride in one’s religion”.In hindsight Ms Gabbard’s evolution from Democrat to Republican is not all that surprising. She prides herself on an independent streak, which she attributes to her upbringing. “Do your research,” her parents told her as a child. “Make your own decisions.” Even when those decisions invited criticism. Her father offered a formative example. Now a senator in Hawaii’s legislature, he introduced his daughter to a stridently anti-gay offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement—what some have called a cult—and took reactionary social positions in a liberal state.Ms Gabbard’s designs for America’s spooks should become clearer during her confirmation hearings early next year; some fear a spy purge is in the offing. Her lack of experience managing bureaucracies may mean her bark is bigger than her bite. There is also the question of the boss’s willingness to listen. Though Mr Trump shares her isolationist instincts, in his first term he ordered strikes on Syria and nearly embroiled America in a war with Iran when he had Qassem Suleimani, a leading general, assassinated. If Ms Gabbard has her way, however, America’s foreign policy is heading for a giant shake-up.