Star’s view U.S. needs clarity on Syria,

Donald Trump appears to have achieved the remarkable feat of making Syrians a sideshow in their own tragedy.

Now that the dust has settled from the cruise missile strike he ordered against a Syrian airbase late last week, it’s increasingly apparent that the attack had much less to do with Syria than it did with Trump’s domestic political agenda and his relations with countries of more strategic importance to the United States.

In itself, hitting out at the regime of Bashar Assad for its role in the horrific chemical gas attack on scores of civilians was the right thing to do — and certainly the moral thing to do.

Barack Obama came in for well-deserved criticism when he failed to take decisive action in 2012 as Assad’s government launched an even more deadly chemical attack on its opponents. There is an undeniable sense of basic justice in seeing the Syrian regime’s forces forcibly rebuked after this latest horror. It’s no wonder that many U.S. allies — including Canada — applauded the strike.

At the same time, it’s far from clear how much actual impact the missile attack had on the Syrian government’s ability to control its territory and continue attacks on rebel forces. With firm backing from Moscow, Assad is in a much stronger position than he was five years ago and will be a lot harder to dislodge from power.

The conservative National Review described the limited U.S. action as “the very definition of a symbolic pinprick.” And multiple sources reported over the weekend that, despite damage wrought by the missiles, Syrian jet fighters were flying missions from the same airfield targeted by U.S. forces against rebels in the same town that suffered last week’s chemical attack.

Consider this headline in the Wall Street Journal just three days after Trump ordered the missile strike: “Emboldened Syria steps up airstrikes.” Far from being cowed by Trump, Assad’s regime actually “stepped up the pace of airstrikes against the opposition,” according to the report. That doesn’t sound like very effective deterrence.

Still, it may not matter much in Washington. Trump’s senior advisers, according to other reports, saw the Syria strike as one element in a political strategy to get his struggling presidency back on track. It was part of what they called “leadership week”— a series of events, including high-profile meetings with the leaders of Egypt, Jordan and China, designed to showcase the embattled president as a man actually in charge of events rather than continuing to stumble from one fiasco to another

At the same time, Trump’s people have not been shy about acknowledging that the president’s dramatic decision to launch the cruise missiles was essentially about the message he wants to send to countries far removed from Syria. “This is bigger than Syria,” an anonymous senior official was quoted as saying. “It’s representative of how he wants to be seen by other world leaders.”

The key targets of the attack, then, would include the likes of Kim Jong Un of North Korea, who is threatening to develop missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the territory of the United States itself.

They would include China, whose leader Xi Jinping found his visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida upstaged by the sudden missile strike.

Most importantly, they include Russia, Assad’s most important ally and military backer. The Trump administration now seems to have flipped from co-operation to confrontation with Moscow, a manoeuvre that has the benefit of countering the narrative that Trump’s rise was covertly enabled by Vladimir Putin.

Finally, the Trump administration still hasn’t figured out a coherent approach to Syria beyond slapping Assad for his egregious use of chemical weapons against vulnerable civilians.

Is U.S. policy still to focus on defeating Daesh (a.k.a. the Islamic State) and worry about Assad at some undefined point in the future? That’s what Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser suggested over the weekend.

Or does the Trump administration now believe there needs to be “regime change” to get Assad out of power (as the president’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, stated)?

No one — including perhaps Trump himself — seems to know the answer.

He deserves applause for upholding basic standards of decency and calling Assad out on the use of horror weapons against civilians. But a great power like the United States needs to act on more than sporadic moral impulses. It needs a well-thought-out strategy that will reassure its allies and deter its enemies.

The attack had much less to do with Syria than it did with Trump’s relations with countries of more strategic importance to Washington