The big red line
As hard as President Trump and company have worked to convince us otherwise, what a president says matters. Even if Americans have learned to ignore Trump’s stream-of-consciousness fulminations, the rest of the world, and some of the worst people in it, are paying attention.
Syrian despot Bashar Assad is suspected of launching another chemical attack on civilians in a rebel-held area a little more than a week after Trump abruptly announced to a rally that U.S. troops would withdraw from the wartorn country “like, very soon.” The reported killing of more than 40 civilians, including children, grimly echoed an atrocity committed soon after Trump took office and announced that Assad’s removal was no longer a priority of the United States.
Remarkably like his predecessor and unhealthy obsession, former President Barack Obama, Trump finds himself wavering between declarations of his determination to stay out of Syria’s grinding civil war and tough-talking responses to Assad’s chemical attacks — which, for all their horror and illegality, are but drops in the buckets of blood spilled by the Syrian regime. Trump’s promise Sunday that Assad would pay a “big price” was accompanied by an unprecedented criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin, another head-spinning foreign policy about-face.
Trump did distinguish himself from Obama — who declared a “red line” on chemical weapons but did little when Assad crossed it — by launching isolated air strikes against a Syrian base following last year’s attack with the nerve agent sarin. The latest massacre shows how little Assad’s regime thought of that.
What’s missing here, as with most of Trump’s foreign policy, is any clear goal or strategy for achieving it. The same can be said of his burgeoning trade war with China, his provocation of North Korea followed by plans for the first summit with its dictator, and the administration’s continuing complicity in Saudi Arabia’s brutal proxy war with Iran in Yemen, the scene of another humanitarian crisis.
Trump on Monday promised “major decisions” about the U.S. response to the latest reported chemical assault. If those decisions don’t address the broader muddle of Trump’s Syria policy, what he decides won’t matter much.