Bernie Sanders’ Internationalism — and His Tulsi Gabbard Problem
The democratic socialist is offering a progressive approach to the threat of right-wing authoritarians. So why is he still promoting one of their friends?
Fascists campaign on border controls — on keeping away refugees driven out by the fascists in their own lands. But 21st-century right-wing extremists, while molded by the peculiarities of their own nationalism, are not themselves constrained by any lines on a map. Today they labor over walls and barbed-wire to further the cause of hate and reaction under the guise of faith and tradition. Neo-Confederates shake hands with members of Greece’s Golden Dawn at secessionist conferences with National Bolsheviks in Russia, a country where the right-authoritarian government did crimes with computers to help elect a fellow traveler in Donald Trump.
The left has been slow to respond, the moral clarity that came with opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq giving way to confusion and stasis — exacerbated by the hubris that sometimes comes with having been right, and devastatingly so. At worst, yesterday’s battles take the place of engaging today’s disconcertingly new fights, a faux-isolationist “realism,” and fixation on U.S.-led regime change, leading some to seek accomodation with the monsters birthed by a dying liberal order; a false peace, by any means necessary.
Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, has recently begun expounding a different vision that is a welcome break from the comforting slogans of the past, and a challenge to those on the left who may be tempted to embrace the “realist” temptation of pseudo-isolation, the idea that socialism at home should require a denial of solidarity with anyone outside Fortress America. In his 2016 primary race against Hillary Clinton, the independent senator hammered the eventual nominee over her support for the Iraq war, his well-earned right, and her relationship with the nothing if not persistent Henry Kissinger. But he had less to say about the world outside America, and how he would approach it in the years to come, his political hits coming on the back of eight years of going along with President Barack Obama’s agenda for the Pentagon.
Sanders has now moved beyond the easy pickings of yore, and is challenging the worst of ossified left thinking on the world outside the coastal hubs of content generation. “It should be clear by now that Donald Trump and the right-wing movement that supports him is not a phenomenon unique to the United States,” he wrote in a September piece for The Guardian. A minority of Americans elected him, to be sure, but neither the president nor his country are exceptional. “All around the world,” Sanders argued, “in Europe, in Russia, in the Middle East, in Asia and elsewhere, we are seeing movements led by demagogues who exploit people’s fears, prejudices, and grievances to achieve and hold on to power.”
This “international authoritarian axis” of Trump, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and their allies, according to Sanders, “demands an “international progressive movement,” one bound together by a belief that human rights do not stop at a border, and fights against those who would violate them — for a democratic society, free from corporate exploitation and the threat of bombs overhead — are stronger when the opponents have numbers. “Our job,” he advised, “is to reach out to those in every corner of the world who share these values, and who are fighting for a better world.”
Much remains to be enunciated, but it’s a good instinct for someone who has eyes on the presidency: countries aren’t just their leaders, and we shouldn’t condemn those who share our values to being crushed by the former. This isn’t a call for more Iraq wars, from someone who opposed the last one, but a realization, perhaps, that we shouldn’t boost tomorrow’s Saddam Hussein in the name of stability, trade, and a false peace. And it’s a welcome respite from the repackaged isolationism, with a war-on-terror blindspot, that some pass off as a left answer to imperialism.
The problem for Bernie, a late bloomer who has been largely preoccupied with domestic concerns, is that he is promoting both sides in this conflict. Indeed, he, his wife, and the institute that bears his name are heavily promoting someone who, should the boot come down on progressives and other living things abroad, would extend a hand to the powerful men stomping them out.
Tulsi Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii, is many things: a military veteran who volunteered to fight in Iraq and, in some circles, an antiwar hero; a keynote speaker at the Progressive Alliance’s People Power Summit, and a keynote speaker and at the annual conference of Christians United for Israel; and an opponent of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen — and an open advocate for Bashar al-Assad’s brutal war in Syria.
But in 2016, a couple months after voting to bar the resettlement of Syrian war refugees, Gabbard quit the DNC and endorsed Bernie’s run for president, cutting ads for his campaign that built this Iraq veteran up as an opponent of war. She has since been rewarded with a fellowship at The Sanders Institute, a think tank led by Bernie’s wife, Jane Sanders, and prime speaking gigs at its events.
When speaking of Yemen, Gabbard’s heart bleeds. It’s a “genocidal war,” she told Sanders, recounting the Saudi-led and U.S.-aided bombing of weddings and children. The guilty are clearly identified: the only party to the conflict that has an air force — not a requirement to commit war crimes, as all parties have, but doubtless a war-crime accelerant. But when it comes to Syria, where hundreds of thousands more have been killed, Gabbard obscures the identity of the killers, Bashar al-Assad and Putin, among others, while appealing for a U.S.-led coalition that includes them.
In Gabbard’s revisionist history, there was never an uprising against the Assad regime. Rather, “since 2011, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and these other countries started this slow, drawn out regime-change war,” all the while using al-Qaeda, she told Sanders, as its boots on the ground (al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate wasn’t formed until 2012, after about a year of Assad regime massacres). This is her issue, for which she is regularly booked to discuss on cable news; she has legislation, too, the “Stop Arming Terrorists Act,” which would cut off aid to anti-Assad rebels. And while Trump cut off the last trickle of aid to these groups some time ago, taking Kissinger’s advice to focus on ISIS instead — the stated reason why the Hawaii congresswoman was the first Democrat to meet with Trump after the 2016 election — Gabbard keeps hitting on her one note: regime change ad infinitum.
That would be fine, to oppose U.S. military intervention in Syria, but there’s a lie here, by omission: the intervention that is already going on. Gabbard, who met with Assad just weeks after her visit to Trump Tower, echoes the Syrian dictator’s propaganda, just as she echoes Trump on the virtues of a U.S.-Russia alliance: it is not Assad, Putin, and their air forces responsible for the devastation of Syria, but everyone else — indeed, they are only bombing terrorists.
She does this while feigning objectivity and expressing a simple desire for peace (at all costs).
To wit: “If President Assad is indeed guilty of this horrible chemical attack on innocent civilians,” she said in April 2017, “I will be the first to call for his prosecution and execution by the International Criminal Court.” At the time, skeptics dismissed this as cynicism — a promise meant to be forgotten after a cable-news segment, not one to be kept. And they were right: The United Nations subsequently confirmed Assad’s guilt for the sarin attack in rebel-held Idlib that killed dozens, while Gabbard’s promised call for a war crimes tribunal was drowned out by a deafening silence when the time came to cry out for one.
Sensing the mood toward Trump, and “seriously considering” a run for president in 2020, Gabbard is now a critic of at least one strongman — over one of his regime’s rarely decent, half-hearted stance against yet another military offensive in Syria (even as its own bombs kill and maim as many as a couple hundred souls each month).
In a Sept. 13 speech on the House floor, on a day the U.S.-led coalition bombed Syria a dozen times, Gabbard condemned Trump because members of his administration have spoken out against a military offensive aimed at conquering rebel-held Idlib, home to over 3.5 million people, half of them refugees.
“They’re now standing up to protect the 20,000 to 40,000 al-Qaeda and other jihadist forces in Syria, threatening Russia, Syria, and Iran with military force if they dare attack these terrorists,” Gabbard remarked. One would never know that the U.S. government had been bombing such forces from the start of its air campaign in 2014, or that Trump had bombed a mosque full of civilians, soon after taking office, over the very charge Gabbard makes today: that only terrorists live in that part of the world. “Russian planes bombing al-Qaeda/al-Nusra and other Islamic terrorists in Syria,” she tweeted in 2015, when the Russian campaign began. “Why is this a bad thing?” (At least 7,000 civilians have been killed in those strikes, according to Airwars.)
Two days before her floor speech, United Nations secretary general António Guterres, explained why, noting any attack on Idlib “would unleash a humanitarian nightmare unlike any seen in the blood-soaked Syrian conflict.” Not throwing more fuel in the fire is the least one could ask, if one were a decent person. And any cognizant observer could see Trump has little desire to intervene on behalf of protecting innocent life; weeks later, he announced the hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops who had effectively been serving as human shields in northern Syria, greenlighting a Turkish offensive against the Kurdish YPG militia a couple business days after finalizing a $3.5 billion weapons deal with the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Does Jane Sanders agree? Gabbard encountered a sympathetic interviewer when she explained that Trump “and his war cabinet, now, recognize that if al-Qaeda is destroyed in Idlib, in Syria … then that ground force will be gone, and this regime change war will, in effect, be over.” This pitch for more war, made non-interventionist by virtue of it being a foreign military whose operations were being cheered, elicited only a nod of a head — and, minutes later, a callback, Jane herself explaining that the opponents of invading Idlib were looking “to protect al-Qaeda.” The civilian population that should be centered is forgotten, or an afterthought in a tweet, Gabbard endorsing a plan to evacuate what logistics dictate would be a fraction of the region’s civilians, to the regime-held territory where, logic suggests, most would already reside, had they not previously elected to avoid it.
It is all, in a word, obscene, and incongruous with Bernie’s own self-stated internationalism. He is no savior either, with blind spots of his own on race and the war on terror, faults of which all should be aware. Still, he is a fundamentally decent human being — not an apologist for genocide. Yet there remains a question of judgment, raised when he endorses, in speech and with fellowships, those who are.
The contrast is jarring: While he met with members of the White Helmets, volunteers who dig out the victims of U.S., Russian, and Syrian airstrikes. Gabbard has met and openly defended their killers, repeatedly expressing a desire for more of the airstrikes that kill them and other civilians. For this, she is rewarded with a featured speaking gig at Sanders Institute events and a glowing endorsement from Bernie’s 501(c)(4), one of the most conservative Democrats — someone who as a state lawmaker opposed civil unions and “homosexual extremist[s]” — rebranded as a bold liberal, an arrangement that’s already driving away the genuinely progressive from the Bernie machine.
Gabbard, meanwhile, is helping lend a progressive veneer to the world’s leading reactionaries.
“President el-Sisi has shown great courage and leadership in taking on this extreme Islamist ideology,” Gabbard said after a meeting with Egypt’s dictator, two years after his security forces killed over a thousand people protesting the coup that brought him to power. “We had a wide-ranging discussion on several issues our countries have in common, including how America and Indian can work together to help combat the global threat posed by Islamic extremism,” she said after a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself a right-wing Hindu extremist who incited the murder of hundreds of Indian Muslims.
It would be ironic if Gabbard’s own ambitions were to split the Bernie vote in 2020. But that sort of justice would be good for a smirk, not the world, regardless of whether one wants a cranky social democrat to be president — though leftists and centrists might agree they could both do a lot worse. It would mean a positive legacy of promoting at least the word “socialism” to the masses, electoral politics aside, would be sullied by a record of sowing confusion as to what that actually is, and who deserves barbarism. Better still would be for the Sanders family to decouple itself from their own upstart Kissinger — a neo-realist who sees friends in right-wing authoritarians, and only terrorists among their opposition — and to choose loyalty to progressive, internationalist ideals, not to an opportunistic lawmaker who saw in Bernie a chance to refresh her own image.
