Trump’s plan for Syria unclear
His team delivers mixed messages about militants and Assad.
The Trump administration gave mixed messages about its goals in Syria on Sunday, with top officials stressing different priorities after a U.S. airstrike that marked a deepening involvement in the country’s bitter conflict.
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that the departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad is a U.S. priority, just as it was under the Obama administration, and that peace in Syria was probably impossible while he remained in power.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took a more nuanced view, asserting that Assad had undermined his legitimacy as a leader but declaring that defeating Islamic State remains the top U.S. goal in Syria.
President Trump’s longterm intentions in Syria thus remained unclear in the days since 59 Tomahawk missiles tore into a Syrian air base that U.S. officials said was used to launch a deadly poison gas attack on April 4 that killed about 80 Syrian civilians and injured dozens more.
The retaliatory airstrike marked a policy reversal for Trump, who had declared throughout his campaign that the United States should not involve itself in local conflicts, an isolationist view consistent with his “America first” policy prism.
On Sunday, Tillerson emphasized that the administration considers defeating the Sunni militants of Islamic State the most pressing concern in Syria, not ousting Assad.
“First and foremost, we must defeat ISIS,” Tillerson said on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” using an acronym for Islamic State. Assad’s eventual fate, he said, “is something that we will be working [on] with allies and others in the coalition.”
That marked an apparent shift from his comments to reporters Thursday night, when he said, “It would seem there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.”
Haley was harsher on CNN’s “State of the Union.” As long as Assad stays in power, she said, “there’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen.”
“If you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad,” she added.
The U.S. envoy said “regime change is something that we think is going to happen” in Syria, but she stopped short of suggesting Washington would directly seek that outcome.
Taken together, the comments of Haley and Tillerson suggested senior members of Trump’s foreign policy team may be seeking to shape the president’s views, with Haley more opposed than Tillerson to Assad remaining in power.
Tillerson’s more restrained language may reflect his plans to visit Moscow for meetings this week, however, where he hopes to ease the latest tensions in ties.
Russia’s government has angrily denounced the missile strike as an act of unwarranted aggression, and denied that Assad’s forces carried out the attack with the banned nerve gas sarin.
But President Vladimir Putin has not personally condemned the U.S. airstrike, and some reports suggest he is unhappy that Assad has boxed him into defending what many consider a war crime.
laura.king@latimes.com