The Lesson of Tulsi Gabbard’s Flip-FlopNEWS | 19 March 2026This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
After ordering the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani killed in 2020, Donald Trump claimed that the military officer had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.” But that justification didn’t pass muster with then–Democratic Representative Tulsi Gabbard.
Gabbard had long been explicit in her insistence that a president cannot unilaterally decide to attack another country in anticipatory self-defense. She’d even co-sponsored the No More Presidential Wars Act in 2018, which stated that the president must “seek congressional authorization prior to any engagement of the U.S. Armed Forces against Syria, Iran, or Russia.” It was not surprising when, in spite of Trump’s determination that Soleimani had posed an imminent threat, Gabbard insisted that the president had “committed an illegal and unconstitutional act.” Gabbard also warned that a war against Iran in particular would be “so costly and devastating” that it would make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “look like a picnic.”
Yet now that Gabbard serves as director of national intelligence to a president waging war on Iran, she is using her position to defend Trump’s unilateral intervention. The president’s recent determination of an imminent threat in Iran seems to be enough for her: Posting to social media yesterday from her official government X account, she wrote, “Donald Trump was overwhelmingly elected by the American people” and “as our Commander in Chief, he is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat, and whether or not to take action he deems necessary to protect the safety and security of our troops, the American people and our country.” Gabbard repeated this argument in a Senate hearing on worldwide threats today.
Lots of Trump supporters, inside and outside the government, have walked back their concerns about the legality or wisdom of waging war with Iran. But Gabbard’s prior critique and her current advocacy for Trump are irreconcilable—and instructive. Trump won the 2024 election in part by signaling to a war-weary country that he would be a “president of peace” who put “America First”––a message that some skeptics of foreign intervention found credible because he was giving leadership roles to anti-interventionist politicians such as Gabbard and J. D. Vance. As it turns out, Gabbard not only failed to influence the Trump administration in a way that prevented war with Iran; she is now giving the president cover for it.
The larger lesson, for those who oppose unilateral and unlawful wars, is that neither a president’s anti-war rhetoric nor his appointments of foreign-intervention skeptics are valuable indicators of how he will act. Members of the executive branch cannot be trusted to leave the war power in the hands of Congress, as the Constitution and the rule of law demands. When people serve at the pleasure of the president, the incentives to empower him are simply too strong. What’s more, even if they take the unusual step of resigning in protest, as Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, just did over Iran, the president remains the boss. (It’s telling that even in resigning, Kent did not break from the president, and instead relied on conspiracy theories to argue that Trump is not to blame for the war that he started.)
The Obama era teaches this same lesson. Candidate Barack Obama, a constitutional-law professor and early opponent of the Iraq War, said all of the things about executive power that anti-interventionists wanted to hear. Then President Obama waged new wars unilaterally while asserting extraordinary powers for the executive branch. And he was often assisted not by Dick Cheney–esque avatars of extreme presidential power, but by erstwhile skeptics of executive power such as Harold Koh. The Republican-led House rejected a resolution to support U.S. action in Libya, but members of Congress declined to stop Obama by cutting off funds or to punish him with impeachment.
More recently, a faction of anti-war populists who have complained about the “establishment” interventions of the George W. Bush and Obama administrations came to believe that elevating people such as Trump, Vance, and Gabbard was the solution. Instead, Trump is governing as a hawkish interventionist; as a result, the 2028 primaries are likely to feature anti-war candidates in both parties.
Voters who are skeptical of foreign intervention should stop investing their hopes in presidents and shift their time, energy, and focus to House and Senate contests. Congress is big and messy; the average voter may worry that the makeup of seats is harder to change than the outcome of one presidential race. But Congress alone can mete out consequences to presidents who pursue unlawful wars. And doing so is core to its duties, even though the legislators now in office have failed to discharge them.
In a bygone generation, Grover Norquist became famous for coercing hundreds of legislators into signing a pledge that they wouldn’t raise taxes. Perhaps a congressional majority will one day have pledged, “I swear to vote for the prompt impeachment and removal of any president who attacks another country without a declaration of war, unless Congress judges that he or she preempted an imminent attack on America.”
Presently, the majority of Congress is focused on pleasing the president. But the only way to stop presidents from unilaterally starting new wars is to elect a Congress that threatens to oust them if they do—and means it.
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