Trump lacks the commitment to impose a lasting solution on Syria

Despite bombing Assad’s airbase, the US president has far more important priorities in the region

The lesson from last week’s US bombing in Syria is this: if you want to make US foreign policy these days, have a camera ready. Horrifying videos of children choking and dying after a sarin gas attack spurred Donald Trump to avenge what he called Syria’s “beautiful babies”. Who can blame him? It wouldn’t be the first time pictures have made policy and Mr Trump’s heartstrings are just as human as anyone else’s. It is certainly heartening to see at least some norms of war defended.

Before we reassess his entire Middle East strategy, however, it’s worth asking what has really changed as a result of the president’s compassion and how far he’s willing to go. The answers, so far, are “not very much” and “not very far”. The new Trump Doctrine, if there is such a thing, might like to make symbolic gestures about human rights, but it’s not prepared to invest enough on the ground to turn the tide in Syria.

It did make a splash at home, of course. Keen to show up Barack Obama for shilly-shallying, Mr Trump bypassed Congress, unleashed the missiles and denounced Syria’s flouting of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the UN peace process. What a contrast to his campaign rhetoric, when he floated the idea of working with Russia and Syrian president Bashir al-Assad to defeat Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), criticised Obama’s attempt to bomb Syria and poured contempt on UN multilateralism.

All of this has sent Mr Trump’s isolationist supporters into a frenzy and his neocon fans into raptures. Conspiracy theorists and far-Right provocateurs lined up to denounce the emergence of Mr Trump’s new “deep state”, police-the-world agenda. Republican interventionists praised the president’s robust defence of human rights, suggesting that this is the start of a major shift in the US approach to Syria. Both are wrong.

The interventionists are trying to seize the moment. They are itching to roll out an exciting new plan for the Middle East. John Bolton, who served as George W Bush’s UN ambassador and cheerleader for the Iraq war, wants to carve up the region’s postcolonial map into new units.

His big idea: if Iraq and Syria’s sects can’t live peacefully together, they ought to live apart. Isil’s emergence showed that Iraq is already falling apart; it might as well be chopped up into “Shia-stan” in the south and “Sunni-stan” in the north. This new Sunni state could then absorb most of Syria’s poor, Sunni, eastern regions, leaving Syria itself with its mixed areas of Shia/Alawites, Christians and others. The Kurds, meanwhile, a Sunni sect but a distinct ethnic group, are already well on their way to constructing their own country.

The idea is thoroughly appealing on paper. Russia, it’s argued, would like to wind up its expensive and bloody fight in Syria, having achieved the aims of gaining a naval base and expanding its influence over world events. The Russians themselves were never very attached to Assad until he made it clear he would not, under any circumstances, agree to step aside. If the US just cranks up the pressure, making Moscow’s Syrian ventures more difficult and expensive, the neocons argue that Vladimir Putin will want to talk.

But if Iraq teaches us anything, it’s to beware of easy answers. Plan “Sunni-stan” is fraught with risk and smacks of the oversimplified neocon world view that helped foment the current mess. If it’s to work – assuming American ground troops are out of the question – it would require the US to support reasonable Sunni allies in the territory that formed much of Isil’s “caliphate”. Those allies would then have to be vetted, trained and unified enough to become a credible military and political force, capable of cooperating with Western air power and intelligence to form a stable state. This would entail enormous cost and might still be impossible.

The US could, of course, step up its bombing without trying to change the whole map, in the hope that it will bring Moscow to the table. But despite the cost of the war, Russian public support for it is high, and there is no sign that Mr Putin will play along. Russia has thrown in its lot in with Assad not because he’s Moscow’s ideal ruler for Syria, but because he controls its government and he simply won’t step down. Boris Johnson can cancel visits and scurry around the G7 to deliver a “hard-hitting” statement about Russia’s activities, but Moscow is still likely to calculate, correctly, that the US doesn’t have the appetite for a really concerted campaign.

This, of course, is the crux of the argument. However moved Mr Trump was by his TV set last week, removing Assad requires more of an investment – in years, blood and cash – than the West wants to make. It certainly requires a longer attention span than Mr Trump has been capable of so far, and a willingness to alienate for ever his isolationist supporters. Mr Bolton might have an exciting plan for the Middle East, but he was not hired for a role in the Trump administration.

Mr Trump has three priorities in the region and, despite the rhetoric over the weekend, Syrian regime change still isn’t at the top of the list. He wants to protect Israel, contain Iranian influence and destroy terrorist groups such as Isil (priorities two and three, incidentally, contradict one another). Removing Assad might have moved up the wishlist, but these other complex priorities still rank higher.

According to analysis by Micah Zenko and Jennifer Wilson at the Council on Foreign Relations, the US dropped more than 26,000 bombs last year – about 12,000 apiece on Syria and Iraq targeting Isil, which still isn’t fully dead, another 1,300 on Afghanistan, several hundred on Libya and a few dozen on Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. The action Mr Trump ordered against the Syrian government last week deployed 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Assad has shown himself capable of any crime to stay in power. Before his chemical attack last week he was regularly attacking hospitals, using cluster bombs, besieging towns and hijacking aid convoys. The West missed a chance to remove him at relatively lower cost in 2013. Creating another opportunity requires much more commitment than Mr Trump is prepared to give.