Could it be that President Trump’s foreign policy is not fake news?

The attack on Syria by the United States will be welcomed as a return to a rules-based world order

To understand the air attacks which President Trump ordered on Thursday night, you need to go back to his predecessor. Of all the presenters of the Today programme, John Humphrys is the least likely to take the conventional BBC line on world events, but yesterday he did. Interviewing the Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, Humphrys accused Mr Trump of having crossed “that red line that President Obama decided not to cross”.

That is history back-to-front. The red line wasn’t a device to stop Obama attacking anyone: it was the line which he himself had drawn. He warned President Assad of Syria not to cross it. In 2013, Assad did cross it, by killing his own people with sarin. Obama did nothing. His was, you might say, a decisive indecision.

Britain had an inglorious role in President Obama’s deadly dither. A coalition of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party and Tory rebels overturned David Cameron’s House of Commons majority and voted, in August 2013, to block military action against Syria, thus sapping American will (and weakening our own future military and diplomatic power).

The consequences were as follows. Chemical weapons, banned since 1925 – a ban which endured even in the Second World War – could now be used unpunished. They were used, expecting no punishment, by Assad’s regime last year, and again this week. Terrorists were emboldened to become territorial and set up what they called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. America abandoned the pre-eminent role in the Middle East which it had maintained since the early Seventies. Russia took up that role. Far, far more people died than would have done if America had not stood aside (the deaths so far are roughly three times the total of the Iraq war). And millions of people fled, destabilising the wider region and large chunks of Europe.

These things became possible because, under eight years of Obama, the United States, although still possessing the necessary military power, lost the necessary will. Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013 gave the president about as clear-cut a legal and moral case for retaliatory force as the modern world is likely to offer. But Obama backed off. If he wouldn’t attack then, his country’s enemies concluded, he wouldn’t attack ever.

So Assad stayed and stays, and killed and kills. Iran pushed Sunnis out of Syria and put Shias in, and made the country its satellite. Russia made hay, not only in the Middle East, but also in Ukraine, and in cyber and propaganda interventions in Western countries, including the US presidential election last year. It felt so cocky that it never bothered to hold Assad to the promise he had made it to stop using chemical weapons. When he did use them this week, Russia refused to blame him and characteristically concocted two different propaganda stories about who the real culprits were.

The US inaction of 2013 had consequences in other parts of the world too. China felt it could own the South China Sea. Kim Jong-un thought he could chuck more and more missiles about. Anyone could “diss” America.

Since yesterday morning, it has not felt quite like that any more. The US attack on the Syrian air base was well timed. Even in the balmy air of Mar-a-Lago, Florida, President Xi Jinping of China, must have felt a certain sharpness in the political wind.

If – an “If ” which, when talking of Mr Trump, one must use with Kipling-esque repetition – the Americans mean it, they may mean other things too. Three weeks before the attack, Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, declared that the United States’s “strategic patience” with North Korea was exhausted. Fat young Kim must now take these words seriously.

Next week, Mr Tillerson is off to Moscow. There he may say he wants America and Russia jointly to underwrite a diplomatic process for a peace in Syria which will involve the departure of Assad. The Russians, who had thought they almost literally owned Mr Trump, are now very angry, but they will be unwise to laugh in Mr Tillerson’s face.

The people feeling happiest this weekend will be America’s traditional friends, for whom the past eight years have been bleak – the Sunni Arab Gulf states, Jordan, even Turkey, Israel, Ukraine, the Baltic States, Poland, Australia (which came out hard and fast in favour of the attack). Beyond these, also feeling a bit more cheerful, stands everyone who believes that world affairs need ordering under some sort of rules-based system.

This ought to include an enthusiastic Britain. Yesterday, Mrs May’s government said it had been informed of, though not involved in, the strikes. It sounded a little reluctant. Sir Michael Fallon’s public response was to say that the next move was “up to the Russians”. Surely it should not be. It is better for Britain and for the planet if Russia is not the prime mover. Despite everything, and more than 70 years after the Second World War, the use of force to uphold world order still depends on the command of the President of the United States.

Which is one reason why so many have been so scared of Mr Trump. As presidential candidate, he seemed to revel in breaking rules, particularly non-American ones. On foreign policy, he sounded like the Yankee equivalent of the English pub bore who says things like, “Frankly, if a load of foreigners want to murder one another, they are welcome to get on with it” – and then complains when the victims of the resulting mayhem flee to his country. Might Trump be either casually violent or selfishly isolationist – or both at once?

It would be rash to assert that Donald Trump has definitely ceased to be Prince Hal and turned into a wise king. Some will think that he arranged to attack Syria only to get a few headlines for his human sympathy for “beautiful babies”, or to distract attention from Congressional investigations, or because he was bored in the small hours.

Others may think that, just as Barack Obama’s foreign policy amounted to little more than saying “I am not George Bush”, so Mr Trump’s is “I am not Barack Obama”. Certainly, it would have been mortifying for him to have been trapped into Obama-like weakness in the face of a repeat atrocity by Assad.

But think of the understandable expectation that President Trump was planning to carve up the world with Vladimir Putin, like a couple of gangsters sorting out their manors, and then compare it with this, his first really important act of foreign policy. It is definitely encouraging.

For a man who loves loudly to assert himself every day of his life, Donald Trump, even before he was inaugurated, showed an interesting malleability about foreign and security policy. If it weren’t impossible to associate the word with him, I might even say modesty. He would leave most of these things, he indicated, to the Secretary of State, or the Defence Secretary, or the generals. Even as he shocked us all by telling us that torture worked, he said he wasn’t going to interfere with the experts, who disagreed.

Could it be that the great disrupter is more interested in fighting the cultural civil war within his own country, and is happy to let the peace of the world be ordered by the same US imperial establishment which has run things since 1945?