Trump’s Syria obligation
P
resident Trump’s decision to attack a Syrian airbase sent a meaningful message to Bashar Assad and any other leader who considers unleashing banned chemical weapons against his people. Namely, that when innocent people are killed in such torturous fashion, there will be swift and sure consequences, albeit limited ones.
But Trump’s action, and statements at the United Nations Friday by Ambassador Nikki Haley committing the United States to a position of global moral leadership against the Assad regime, force into sharp relief the confusions and contradictions in an American policy on Syria that has reinvented itself with strange suddenness.
Before the United States digs itself deeper into a conflict with Assad and, by extension, Russia, it is incumbent on the President — and Congress, which is supposed to have a key role in authorizing the use of force — to explain America’s objectives and wider strategy in the region.
The turnabout in the Trump administration’s approach is jarring. As a citizen and then candidate for President, Trump repeatedly warned against military intervention in the Mideast and refused to open America’s doors to the refugee victims of Assad’s brutality.
All of them, even the children, were potential security threats, the President cruelly insisted.
As to answering Assad’s use of chemical weapons with an American military response, Trump was strenuously against that, too.
A 2013 sarin gas attack killed an estimated 1,000 people. Trump, unfazed then by the carnage, said “the President must get Congressional approval before attacking Syria” — echoing many Republican members of Congress who back then insisted the same — and warned Obama, in tweet after unconditional tweet, to “stay out of Syria.”
Cynics will call his change of heart opportunistic. More charitably and for the sake of good-faith argument, we will chalk it up to the sudden weight that comes with the responsibility of being commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military, and the chilling images of choking children.
The shifts in the President’s geopolitical perspective are as puzzling as his moral awakening. Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump welcomed Russian military involvement in Syria, in service of Moscow’s close ally Assad.
Convinced against all evidence that Vladimir Putin’s offensive was focused on crushing the Islamic State, Trump was unbothered that brutal airstrikes were killing thousands upon thousands of innocent people.
Just last week, in a natural extension of that posture, Haley and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said America was no longer interested in removing Assad.
Flash forward: A single act — albeit, a brutal one — has reinvented the Trump administration overnight into hawks on the verge of advocating forcible regime change.
Tillerson now asserts that there is “no role” for Assad to “govern the Syrian people,” and that “steps are underway” for a possible international effort to remove him.
As she excoriated Russia’s complicity or collaboration in the gas attack, Haley told the UN the United States is “prepared to do more” unless civilized nations ban together “to stop the horrors.”
Meantime, Russia Friday intensified its rhetoric against the United States, calling the missile attack a flagrant violation of international law.
Russia is wrong. But this is a moment for the Trump administration to pause, decide what goals it seeks to achieve — and articulate them to the American people.
Having learned hard lessons from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, citizens need to be convinced that their government has clear and defensible objectives.
That it comprehends the extensive military risks — including the risks of military escalation with Russia.
And that escalating what is now a civil war and regional conflict will not further metastasize the terrorist enemy that is ISIS.
We cannot, must not, stumble haphazardly into a wider war.