"Yes. There’s no question. I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset.” Such was the incendiary accusation that Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) leveled at the former congresswoman for Hawaii and current Trump administration nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Schultz’s accusation was not a one-off, but has been repeated by other elected officials and individuals who support the foreign policy status quo.

Summing up this accusation, the political commentator Joe Walsh called Gabbard a Russian “asset” because “everything she has done and said over the past 10 years has been exactly what Russia would want her to say or do. So she’s either an asset or a dupe.” These efforts to cast Gabbard and other Americans as “assets or dupes” rely on conflating legitimate foreign policy dissent with the presence of (real or imagined) foreign espionage and propaganda on American soil.

The insinuation or blatant accusation equating legitimate dissent to traitorous behavior is an evergreen aspect of American foreign policy discourse. From the First World War until the present, this rhetorical sleight of hand has conflated actual foreign efforts at propaganda and espionage with unrelated domestic speech acts and associations related to foreign policy dissent. This tactic also depends upon the United States government’s virtually endless state of war or pseudo-war since 1941. This state of society has allowed those who support an activist foreign policy to apply the levers of legal or rhetorical pressure against those who dissent on American foreign policy. Throughout the 20th century, such accusations have narrowed the Overton window of foreign policy opinion and undermined the very democratic values that its users claim to defend.

This conflation has continuously served supporters of an interventionist foreign policy since American involvement in the First World War. In addition to a full suite of public and private attacks on American liberty, the federal government and its representatives routinely defamed American citizens who opposed entry into the war as enemy sympathizers. Even after the war, the 1920 Democratic presidential nominee, James M. Cox, referred to the Republicans as the “pro-German party,” and those who voted for his opponent, Warren Harding, as traitors. As a testament to their desire to move on from the war and its destruction of their liberties on the home front, Americans sent Harding to the White House in the biggest electoral blowout in nearly 50 years. Thanks to a comparatively modest foreign policy in the absence of significant great power competition during the interwar period, Americans were spared such attacks.