With Syrian missile strike, Trump reawakens old U.S.

Then last week, Assad drops chemical weapons on rebel-held territory and Trump launches 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria.

This was, in part, an emotional reaction to images of children dying of sarin poisoning. And, in part, seizing the opportunity to redeem Barack Obama’s unenforced red line on chemical weapons.

Whatever the reason, moral or strategic, Trump acted. And effectively reset his entire foreign policy.

True, in and of itself, the raid will not decisively alter the course of Syria’s civil war. Assad and his Iranian, Russian and Hezbollah co-combatants still have the upper hand — but no longer a free hand. After six years of U.S. passivity, there are limits now and America will enforce them.

Nor was the raid the beginning of a campaign for regime change. It was, however, a reassertion of an American stake in both the conduct and the outcome of the war.

Moreover, the very swiftness of the response carried a message to the wider world. Obama is gone. No more elaborate forensic investigations. No agonized presidential handwringing over the moral dilemmas of a fallen world. It took Obama 10 months to decide what to do in Afghanistan. It took Trump 63 hours to make Assad pay for his chemical-weapons duplicity.

America demonstrated its capacity for swift, decisive action. And in defense, mind you, of an abstract international norm — a rationale that dramatically overrides the constraints of America First.

The Syria strike sent a message to both China and North Korea that Trump’s threats of unilateral action against Pyongyang’s nukes and missiles are serious. A pre-emptive strike against those facilities is still unlikely but today conceivable. Even more conceivable is a shoot-down of a North Korean missile in flight.

The message to Russia was equally clear. Don’t push too far in Syria and, by extension, in Europe. We’re not seeking a fight, but you don’t set the rules.

The larger lesson is this: In the end, national interest prevails. Populist isolationism sounds great, rouses crowds and may even win elections. But contra White House adviser Steve Bannon, it’s not a governing foreign policy for the United States.

Bannon may have written the come-home-America inaugural address. But it was the old hands, Trump’s traditionally internationalist foreign policy team led by Defense Secretary James Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, who rewrote the script with the Syria strike.

This is not to say that things could not change tomorrow. For now, however, the traditionalists are in the saddle. U.S. policy has been normalized. The world is on notice: Eight years of sleepwalking is over. America is back.