NEWS ANALYSIS
Trump team sends mixed signals on its foreign policy
@susanpage USA TODAY
President Trump’s decision to strike Syria with cruise missiles after its use of chemical weapons signals a fundamental shift in the “America First” doctrine he espoused during last year’s campaign. officials and such frequent GOP critics as Sen. John McCain — and alarm from some who had backed his election.
“I guess Trump wasn’t ‘Putin’s puppet’ after all, he was just another deep state/Neo-Con puppet,” Paul Joseph Watson of the alt-right Infowars complained in a tweet Thursday night. “I’m officially OFF the Trump train.” (The next morning, he tweeted that he was “off the train” only on Syria policy.)
During the campaign, Trump promised an approach that would focus on defeating Islamic State terrorists while withdrawing from much of the international economic and security engagement that has defined U.S. policy since World War II. He had urged then-president Obama specifically to stay out of Syria, arguing that its civil war shouldn’t become America’s problem.
But in remarks late Thursday from his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida, Trump said he ordered Tomahawk missiles launched at a Syrian airfield because it was in the “vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”
So does the administration now seek the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad?
Haley said yes. “There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” she said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Tillerson said no. “I think the president was very clear in his message to the American people that this strike was related solely to the most recent horrific use of chemical weapons against women, children, and as the president said, even small babies,” he said on ABC’s This Week. “Other than that, there is no change to our military posture.”
National security adviser H.R. McMaster declined to clarify just where Trump stands on Syria, denying that Tillerson and Haley had contradicted one another. “While people are really anxious to find inconsistencies in those statements, they are in fact very consistent in terms of what is the ultimate political objective in Syria,” he said on Fox News Sunday.
“There’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime.”