Stand up for innocents
It is hard to imagine anyone feeling that Syrian strongman Bashar Assad has been wronged by the U.S. cruise missile strikes against a Syrian air base. The world has, for too long, ducked meaningful action to halt the atrocities he has wreaked, with impunity, on civilians caught in the country’s ugly civil war.
But whether the American action is the start of a new, coherent or sustained strategy toward Syria is anyone’s guess. And because no one knows, we cannot judge the strikes’ long-term effects.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau quickly said his government supported the missile attack as a “limited and focused action to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch chemical weapons attacks against innocent civilians.” He had little choice: Not wanting to be seen tolerating Assad’s habit of gassing children, and faced with a powerful neighbour that wants more than a “tweak” in our trade relations, the prime minister got behind the Americans, though with mildly coded language and assurances that Canada wants the Syria crisis resolved through multilateralism and diplomacy.
All Western leaders now face an unavoidable problem: the inconsistent nature of Donald Trump. If we believed the Trump administration would strike again whenever Assad committed a war crime, we might be able to tailor a foreign or defence policy around this. But the man who has hitherto suggested he prefers an isolationist America might just as easily ignore Assad’s future aggressions, or feel he does not want sustained brinkmanship with Russia. Canada, and other U.S. allies, must wait and see.
For the president, the immediate fallout may be good. For months, American pundits have discussed Trump in terms of the Machiavellian “mad man” theory (also used to describe Richard Nixon): If the world thinks he’s crazy enough, it will try hard not to cross him. That Trump ordered the missile attack while he was hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping must leave the Chinese, for instance, wondering if he will take matters into his own hands with regard to misbehaving North Korea, and order a military strike there too.
Where Nixon was more calculating than mad, however, Trump may be more mad than calculating. His action against Assad was correct — even Hillary Clinton urged a harder line on Syria than did Barack Obama — but perhaps not based on a consistent, long-term worldview.
Still, someone very powerful has just sent a concrete, not rhetorical, message to Assad. If he hesitates about committing future war crimes, some good has been achieved.