The TOI Correspondent from Washington:US intelligence czar, Tulsi Gabbard, a self-professed Hindu-American close to the BJP-RSS establishment, will be the first high-level official from the Trump II administration to visit India later this week, indicating that despite the tangle over tariffs, Washington is keen advance its Indo-Pacific strategy with other Asian partners to meet the Chinese challenge.
Gabbard posted a “wheels up” message on X shortly before embarking on a trip to Japan, Thailand, and India, to build “strong relationships, understanding, and open lines of communication” that she said are “vital to achieving President Trump’s objectives of peace, freedom and prosperity.”
She described it as a “multi-nation trip to the Indo-Pacific, a region I know very well having grown up as a child of the Pacific,” a reference to her origins in American Samoa, the farthest US territory that is closer to Asia and Australia than to America. Gabbard’s mother, from whom she embraced the Gaudiya Vaishnavism faith, later moved to Hawaii, from where Gabbard was elected to Congress as a Democrat for four terms before gravitating to the Trump world.
Gabbard said she would first stop at Honolulu, her home turf, where she said she will meet intelligence community partners, leaders of the Indo-Pacific command, and troops engaging in training, with a brief stopover in France on the return leg from India. Before entering politics and earning Trump’s trust to win the top intel job in America, she also served in the US military with a 12-month deployment in Iraq.
Gabbard’s trip is also unusual in the sense that her seven predecessors as Directors of National Intelligence (DNI), who oversee all US intel agencies including CIA and NSA, seldom traveled abroad, much less announced their travels. This is Gabbard’s second overseas trip after she attended the Munich Security Conference soon after she was confirmed by the Senate as DNI.
In fact, her visit to New Delhi, where she is expected to participate in the Raisina security dialogue, was born during another unusual meeting when she called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House during his February visit to Washington. She was the first Trump official he received, hours after her confirmation to the intel job by the US Senate, attesting to their long association which saw Modi send personal envoys to her wedding in Hawaii in 2015.
While China is expected to remain the focus of the US Indo-Pacific strategy, Gabbard’s visit to Asia also comes amid a tectonic recasting of Washington’s ties across the Atlantic, where Trump has disdained Europe and embraced Russia. Gabbard was one of the few US lawmakers not to take a toxic view of Moscow, earning her the dubious sobriquet of being a “Russian asset” from former establishment figures, all of whom are now in the Trump doghouse.
Shortly before she got on the plane, Gabbard announced that at Trump’s directive, she was revoking the security clearances and barring access to classified information to a host of Democratic operatives, including former secretary of state Antony Blinken and former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan.
“The President’s Daily Brief (PBD) is no longer being provided to former President Biden,” she said. PBD is a compendium of classified intelligence of top developments in the world given each morning to the President and former presidents.