Trump’s emerging doctrine apparently hinges on flexibility
Authorization of Syria airstrike contrasts with campaign stance
PALM BEACH, Fla. — In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s surprise strikes on Syria, his allies and adversaries have searched for some broader meaning in his decision.
Is Trump now a humanitarian interventionist, willing to wield American military power when foreign governments threaten their own citizens? Is he a commander in chief who once warned against intervention in Syria but is now prepared to plunge the United States deeper into the conflict? Is he turning on Russia, one of Syria’s most important patrons, after months of flirting with closer U.S. ties with Moscow?
Trump would say he’s simply flexible, an emerging foreign policy doctrine that leaves room for evolution and uncertainty.
“I don’t have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go the same way, I don’t change,” Trump said Wednesday, a day after the chemical weapons attack in Syria that compelled him to order airstrikes against a government air base. “Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I’m proud of that flexibility.”
Mark Feierstein, who served in the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, said it’s difficult to glean a direction for U.S. policy from Trump’s actions in Syria because Trump “is not moored to any coherent ideology or set of ideas.”
Elasticity a virtue
But for some of Trump’s supporters, ideological elasticity is a virtue for a president who took office with no practical foreign policy experience. They say it gives the former real estate mogul breathing room to learn on the job and accept advice from advisers.
“I think as time goes on, every day that has passed, he more and more has understood the gravity of U.S. leadership,” said GOP Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The angry reaction to the Syria strikes from some of his strongest campaign supporters showed that they expected him to fulfill promises to stay out of Syria.
“Those who wanted us meddling in the Middle East voted for other candidates,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, tweeted.
As a candidate and private citizen, Trump cast Syria’s civil war as a quagmire from which the United States should steer clear. Until the chemical weapons attack, Trump mainly saw Syria as a hotbed for terrorists seeking to attack the U.S. He rarely spoke of the hundreds of thousands killed and the millions displaced during the six years of clashes between the Assad government, backed by Russia and Iran, and opposition groups.
Not the first to change
“He seems to put great score in unpredictability, and that’s not such a bad thing in foreign relations if it has some kind of framework around it,” said Peter Romero, a top State Department official in the Clinton
“There’s always a transformation that takes place from a person who wins the presidency . … Trump suddenly realizes he’s responsible for much of the world.” Edward Djerejian, Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy
administration. But Romero said that if Trump is “being erratic, then it’ll have very little impact.”
Trump is hardly the first president to change his approach to America’s role in the world. In 2011, President Barack Obama justified intervention in Libya by citing specific criteria, including the imminent slaughter of civilians. When most of the same guidelines appeared applicable in Syria, particularly after a deadly 2013 chemical weapons attack, Obama backed away from planned military strikes.
“There’s always a transformation that takes place from a person who wins the presidency, and then once he assumes office he necessarily sees the world from a different perspective,” said Edward Djerejian, a former U.S. ambassador to Syria and Israel who now directs Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Trump suddenly realizes he’s responsible for much of the world.”