Trump’s rash Damascus moment
MOSCOW is increasingly aware that the idea that Russian-US relations are on the mend since Republican President Donald Trump took the reins in the White House have been somewhat exaggerated.
“Moscow will soon be remembering Barack Obama with nostalgia,” Russian analysts have mused following the US missile strike in Syria.
The world should learn to reconcile itself with the idea that as long as Trump remains at the helm in Washington, US policy will be eccentric, volatile, and prone to U-turns within a matter of hours, analysts say.
In the early hours of last Friday, the US launched a missile strike on Syria. Dozens of Tomahawks crashed on an air base of government forces in Homs Province. The prime target was the al-Shayrat air base, also used by Russia’s air force in Syria.
The missile strike, as Washington said, was in retaliation for a suspected chemical attack in Syria’s Idlib province, which, the West claims, had been carried out by President Bashar al-Assad’s government forces.
Until that moment, the US-led coalition had focused its strikes only on Islamic State targets, avoiding attacks on government troops. Trump has now gone further than his predecessor.
During his election campaign Trump had said repeatedly that the joint struggle against the Islamic State in Syria should be a cornerstone of Washington’s co-operation with Moscow.
At the beginning of this month, US administration officials said that ousting al-Assad was not on their list of priorities. Moreover, during his election campaign Trump could even drop a flattering remark or two addressed to the Syrian president.
Now the US president, who just recently saw Assad as a potential ally in the war on terror, slams him as an embodiment of evil. Trump blamed the alleged chemical attack in Idlib – which is said to have claimed more than 80 lives – on Damascus.
“My attitude towards Syria and Assad has changed very much,” Trump said.
Following the incident, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has urged Russia to give serious thought to whether it should continue supporting al-Assad.
Syria’s government forces have denied they used chemical weapons.
“Nobody will ever believe the lies about chemical weapons. Only those who fabricate them will,” the Syrian defence ministry’s spokesperson said on his Facebook page.
Moscow is certain that deliberate use of such weapons by the Syrian government is out of the question. The Russian Defence Ministry says in reality the Syrian planes attacked positions of terrorist groups entrenched in the city to which the rules of truce do not apply.
Also, that the strikes hit a warehouse of toxic chemicals, which may have caused the disaster.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova suspects that the video that shows choking civilians in Khan Shaykhun may turn out to be a fake.
Moscow’s official reaction to the missile strike was firm.
President Vladimir Putin believes that the US missile strike against the Syrian base in Homs province was an act of aggression against a sovereign state and a violation of international law committed on a far-fetched pretext, presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said last Friday.
“Putin sees the US strikes in Syria as an attempt to distract the world community’s attention from the heavy civilian casualties in Iraq,” he added.
“The Syrian army no longer has chemical weapons at its disposal,” he recalled.
“The very instance of the elimination of all of Syria’s chemical weapons was registered and confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Putin believes that utter neglect of the instances of chemical weapons being used by terrorists merely exacerbates the situation,” Peskov stated.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the US government machinery managed to “upset” the new US president’s election pledges in just 10 weeks.
“By taking this military action, the US administration has proved its extreme dependence on the opinion of the Washington establishment, the new president criticised so strongly in his inauguration speech,” Medvedev said.
The Russian Foreign Ministry came out with an official announcement that Moscow had suspended the operation of the memorandum concluded with the US for the prevention of incidents and ensuring flight safety over Syria.
When Trump rose to power, many in Russia hoped for an improvement of Russian-US relations. So far there have been no signs that such hopes were justified, many Russian politicians agree.
The long-expected anti-terrorist coalition of Russia and the US in Syria, something Trump dwelt upon at length many a time after his election triumph “looks a stillborn child”, the chairperson of the international affairs committee of Russia’s Federation Council (upper house of parliament) Konstantin Kosachev said.
“Russian cruise missiles keep hitting the terrorists, and the American ones Syrian government troops, which as a matter of fact bear the brunt of the fighting with the terrorists,” Kosachev said in Facebook.
Moscow believes it is a strange coincidence that the White House suddenly took a hard line on al-Assad just days after what looked like a warming. Shortly before that Washington had stated Assad’s resignation as the head of the Syrian state was no longer a priority aim.
“One has a firm impression that the Pentagon and US secret services disagreed with this and were quick to corner Trump with another offer of ‘irrefutable evidence’,” said Kosachev.
Russia’s disappointment is even stronger than it might have been had Hillary Clinton become US president.
Andrei Kolesnikov, the chairperson of the Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions Programme at the Carnegie Moscow Center, believes that the recent events “put the US and Russia on the doorstep of another, very risky phase of a proxy war”.
“The struggle against terrorism in Syria, once regarded as a means of achieving reconciliation between the two countries, has in fact enhanced conflict risks.”
In a situation such as this, the effectiveness of the war on the Islamic State leaves much to be desired.
Effectiveness of the war on Islamic State leaves much to be desired