US warns Russia of military force
• Contours of West’s response to Syria’s bloody civil war may be shifting after chemical attack
The Trump administration has warned that it is ready to take further military action if the regime of Bashar al-Assad wages another chemical attack, even as last week’s missile strike ratcheted up tensions with Russia. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and counterpart Sergey Lavrov discussed the Syria situation during a phone call on Saturday.
The Trump administration has warned that it is ready to take further military action if the regime of Bashar al-Assad wages another chemical attack, even as last week’s missile strike ratcheted up tensions with Russia.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and counterpart Sergey Lavrov discussed the Syria situation during a phone call on Saturday initiated by the US, the Russian foreign ministry said on its Facebook page.
INTENDS TO INTERVENE
The White House so far has given indication the US intends to intervene more broadly in Syria’s civil war after Thursday night’s bombing. Yet the contours of the West’s response may be shifting.
On Saturday, UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson cancelled a planned trip to Moscow for high-level meetings on Monday after co-ordinating with the US, saying he would meet instead with his Group of Seven (G-7) peers in Italy to discuss the Syrian crisis and “Russia’s support for Assad”.
“I discussed these plans in detail” with Tillerson, Johnson said in a statement. “He will visit Moscow as planned and, following the G-7 meeting, will be able to deliver that clear and coordinated message to the Russians.” Johnson called on Russia “to do everything possible to bring about a political settlement in Syria”.
Russia pushed back. “Our western colleagues live in their own parallel reality, in which they first try to build joint plans single-handedly and then — again single-handedly — change them, inventing absurd reasons,” Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said by phone.
The US “is the most unpredictable state”, Zakharova said earlier on state TV, terming Trump’s missile strike “self-affirmation in the face of the most severe domestic political struggle”.
In Saturday’s call, Lavrov told Tillerson the US move against Syrian government forces threatened the fight against terrorism and that Russia did not believe the Syrian military had used chemical weapons. He called for a “thorough and impartial” investigation. Tillerson will travel to Moscow on April 12, his department said.
On Friday, the US ambassador to the UK, Nikki Haley, said Assad’s government “must never use chemical weapons again, ever”. Iran and Russia bear responsibility for propping up the Syrian leader and perpetuating the bloody six-year-old conflict there, she said.
“The US took a very measured step last night,” Haley told a meeting of the UN Security Council. “We are prepared to do more.”
She repeated that warning in an interview with CNN’s State of the Union programme that was to be aired on Sunday. If Trump “needs to do more, he will do more”, Haley said, according to a statement from CNN with text highlights of the pre-taped interview. “So really now what happens depends on how everyone responds to what happened in Syria, and make sure that we start moving towards a political solution, and we start finding peace in that area.”
President Donald Trump’s decision to launch the cruise missile strike after accusing Assad of using deadly sarin gas against civilians in the town of Khan Sheikhoun was widely interpreted as more a warning than a major shift in a strategy of toppling the regime.
It also sent a message to President Vladimir Putin that Trump’s often expressed desire to improve US relations with Moscow had limits.
Administration officials indicated that the US approach in Syria, which included air cover for groups battling Islamic State forces and hundreds of ground troops training and supporting them, was not expanding. Trump’s position, like that of former president Barack Obama, has been that the fight against Islamic State is the first priority, and that the fate of the Assad regime will be up to some political process involving Syrian rebel groups at a later date.
Tillerson said on Thursday that the strike on the air base from which Syrian government forces launched a chemical attack this week was a proportionate response to the use of prohibited weapons.
“I would not in any way attempt to extrapolate that to a change in our policy or our posture relative to our military activities in Syria today,” Tillerson said at a media briefing after the US action. “There’s been no change in that status.”
White House press secretary Sean Spicer reinforced that on Friday. “First and foremost, the president believes that the Syrian government, the Assad regime, should at the minimum agree to abide by the agreements they made not to use chemical weapons,” he said.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the US would “in the near future” announce fresh sanctions against Syria aimed at deterring countries and companies from doing business with Assad’s government.
Trump ran for president on a promise to focus on US domestic interests, criticising the foreign entanglements of his predecessors. But when he announced the strikes late on Thursday at his Palm Beach, Florida, club, Trump said he was moved by the images of the more than 70 men, women and children who died in the April 4 gas attack. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror,” Trump said.
TRUMP’S DECISION TO LAUNCH THE MISSILE ATTACK WAS WIDELY SEEN AS A WARNING, NOT A MAJOR SHIFT IN STRATEGY