World not safer

So “the world is a little safer” now Donald Trump has taken to chucking cruise missiles about ( Weekend Herald editorial, April 8). Really? An unstable narcissist moved by images of “beautiful babies murdered” commits the United States to military action contradicting all his previous statements on Syria and his buddy Vladimir Putin. If Trump really cared about Syrians he would be welcoming refugees, not persecuting them with “Muslim bans”. After all, the civil war has been killing Syrian children for six years, if not always in this uniquely horrible way.

The attack on the Syrian airbase may have been intended as a one-off “red line” to deter Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons against his own people but there is the risk of mission creep. Has America learned nothing from its interventions in Iraq and Libya, where the overthrow of dictators left something far worse. Equally worrying, will Trump, whose ratings have been at a unique low, learn from the knee-jerk approbation that has greeted this attack that war is the path to popularity for US Presidents?

That a leader obsessed with how he is perceived and the attention span of a small child, whose view of the world is formed by Twitter and tabloid TV, can turn 180 degrees at the sight of a harrowing picture and unleash a missile strike on a country with which America is not at war, and which has a nucleararmed ally in Russia, gives me no cause at all to think the world is safer.

Michael O’Donoghue, Waiheke Island.