The deafening silence of Tulsi Gabbard
The director of national intelligence is the latest official to choose ambition over principle.
By Stephen Kinzer, Boston Globe – March 31, 2026
Where have you gone, Tulsi Gabbard? When you ran in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, I voted for you because you campaigned so forcefully against “regime change wars.” You used that phrase again at your Senate confirmation hearing last year, after President Trump named you director of national intelligence. Yet now you seem fine with Trump’s unnecessary war against Iran.
Perhaps your views have changed and you now support campaigns to bomb foreign governments out of power. Another possible explanation could be summed up in a single word: careerism. Your job gives you power and allows you to jet around the world meeting foreign ministers and spy chiefs. If you resign on principle, you might find yourself back home in Hawaii, maybe hosting a podcast and earning extra money as a yoga teacher or surfing instructor. Something like that has apparently led you to bite your tongue and support policies you once abhorred.
“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” you said in recent testimony on Capitol Hill. “That is up to the president, based on a volume of information that he receives.”
In fact, it certainly is the job of intelligence advisers to give the president informed assessments not tailored to his liking. Yet your willingness to appease Trump puts you in prominent company. History, including the recent history of the United States, is full of examples of high officials whose attraction to power overwhelmed their consciences.
During Trump’s last presidential campaign, then-senator JD Vance endorsed him in The Wall Street Journal with a column headlined: ”Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” Now that Vance is vice president, he has uttered nary a critical peep about Trump’s war against Iran.
Vance at least has the excuse that vice presidents are not supposed to criticize the boss. Samantha Power, the director of the US Agency for International Development during the Biden administration, arrived in Washington as a champion of moral principle. She came to prominence by writing a book about the evils of genocide. During her term as director of USAID, however, she kept silent about Biden’s decision to supply bombs that Israel used to devastate Gaza. The rich perquisites of her job evidently overwhelmed whatever remained of her conscience. Pressed about her silence after she left office, she defended herself with a pitiful response: “I don’t just get up and decide today what US foreign policy is. That is the price of being in government.”
Annelle Sheline, a midlevel State Department official who did follow her conscience and quit over the Gaza war, declared upon quitting that she could not “serve an administration that enables such atrocities.” Later she singled out Power as a classic example of hypocritical careerism.
“The idea that she was able to do some kind of good by staying in is nonsensical, whereas the idea of her leaving would have sent such a clear signal,” Sheline said in an interview with Current Affairs. “If the person who made her entire professional career calling out genocide were to have quit over this, it would have been very clear that this is, in fact, a genocide, or that it was unconscionable that the Biden administration was continuing to support Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza…. She is the example of this above all others because her entire reputation was built on calling out genocide.”
Two other examples that show how the lust for power can overwhelm principles unfolded during the 1994 Rwanda genocide. The United Nations commander on the ground reported that he could prevent the impending slaughter with a few thousand peacekeepers. They never arrived, largely because the American ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, worked assiduously to limit the size of the force. Albright’s boss, President Clinton, opposed a large peacekeeping operation because he feared it would unfold in ways that might hurt his chances for reelection. If she had pleaded with him to change his mind or quit in protest, she would have liquidated her chance to become secretary of state and probably ended up back on the Georgetown faculty. It turned out to be an easy call for her — and a successful one, since she ultimately got the promotion she wanted.
Albright’s partner in preventing the dispatch of peacekeepers to Rwanda, Kofi Annan, was also driven by careerism. As director of UN peacekeeping operations, he hid vivid pleas from his commander inside Rwanda, rather than transmitting them to the Security Council. Annan wanted the top UN job, secretary general. Like Albright, he knew that he would ruin his chances if he alienated the powers that be — in this case, the United States and France, which was the principal supporter of the genocide regime. He made the same call she did. Three years later he was rewarded by being chosen secretary general.
“I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition,” the murderous Macbeth confesses in Shakespeare’s play. In public as well as private life, suchthat vaulting ambition often drowns honor and conscience. Gabbard is only the most recent of many who have fallen victim to it.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.