Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, is heading to Asia on a trip that will include an appearance at a security conference in India next week.
Gabbard announced in a social media post Monday that she was traveling to Japan, Thailand and India and would visit France on the way back to the United States.
It is Gabbard’s second international trip as a top Trump administration official. Immediately after she was confirmed a month ago, she traveled to Germany to attend the Munich Security Conference.
On Wednesday, Gabbard arrived in Hawaii, which hosts a large National Security Agency office as well as the military’s Indo-Pacific Command headquarters, officials said. Gabbard, who represented the state for eight years in Congress, will meet with military and intelligence officers while in Hawaii, according to her social media post, in which she also said she would watch U.S. troops train.
The Asia leg of Gabbard’s trip will culminate in an address on March 18 at the Rasina conference, a multinational gathering of security officials in New Delhi, to which she was invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There, Gabbard will hold bilateral meetings with Indian officials and officials from other countries, a senior Trump administration official said.
The Rasina conference is often attended by senior Russian security officials and experts. It is not clear, however, whether Gabbard will have bilateral meetings with Russian officials on the conference’s sidelines.
The Trump administration is pushing for a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, and has been pressuring the Kyiv government to make concessions to end the war.
Trump administration officials’ comments at the Munich conference in February left many European diplomats reeling, particularly Vice President JD Vance’s rebuke of Europe for what he said was abridging conservatives’ free speech.
But Gabbard’s remarks, which focused on counterterrorism cooperation between Europe and America, were well received by European diplomats eager for any sign that U.S. intelligence agencies intend to preserve their partnerships with long-standing allies.
The senior administration official said Gabbard intended to strike similar themes in India and would address counterterrorism, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and intelligence sharing.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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