It's an old adage that politics is the art of compromise, of wheeling and dealing between disparate views to advance your own. That truism has always made politics a difficult fit for ideologues seeking to wield substantial power. And everyone in politics must determine how far they're willing to compromise to be productive before violating their own principles or even losing their soul to the process.

It's clear that after this weekend and the joint, unprovoked American–Israeli attack on Iran, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard must choose to resign or forfeit any respectability in the America First movement.

She has chosen principle over power before, and we must ask her to do it again.

The youngest woman ever elected to a state legislature, Gabbard chose to forgo reelection to the Hawaii House of Representatives so she could participate in a deployment to Iraq as a member of the Hawaii National Guard. "My goal is to actually be of service, not just to hold onto my position," the 23-year-old said at the time. (Lt. Col. Gabbard remains an active member of the National Guard.)

Elected to Congress in 2012, Gabbard was initially toasted by Democratic leadership in Washington who tripped over themselves to elevate a woman of color and war veteran. As a freshman she was unanimously elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, but she resigned in February 2016 to endorse the progressive presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders. She forfeited any goodwill she had with the party establishment when she publicly criticized the DNC for violating its supposed neutrality and putting its finger on the scale in favor of eventual nominee Hillary Clinton.

Years later, during her own insurgent presidential campaign in 2020, Gabbard effectively conceded her ability to seek reelection in the House when she truthfully labeled Clinton "the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long…" 

More than any presidential candidate since Dr. Ron Paul—whose 90th birthday she attended last year—Gabbard branded herself as an opponent of Washington's global empire and the endless wars in the Middle East.

As I reported for The American Conservative in 2020, her campaign was not uniformly anti-interventionist—her complaint was always more about wars on behalf of Al Qaeda than wars against it, and she held to the opinion that the motivation for terrorism was Islamic extremism, rather than seeing it as blowback for past interventions. But her rallying to the antiwar cause was unmistakable, particularly on Iran.

"This president and his chickenhawk cabinet have led us to the brink of war with Iran," she declared on the Democratic debate stage in 2019, indicting Donald Trump during his first term. "The American people need to understand that this war with Iran would be far more devastating, far more costly than anything that we ever saw in Iraq. It would take many more lives, it would exacerbate the refugee crisis, and it wouldn't be just contained within Iran. This would turn into a regional war. This is why it's so important that every one of us, every single American stand up and say, 'No war with Iran.'"