Trump’s voice missing in Syria policy talks
WASHINGTON — In the days since President Donald Trump ordered a cruise missile strike against Syria in retaliation for a chemical attack on civilians, his administration has spoken with multiple voices as it seeks to explain its evolving policy. But one voice has not been heard from: that of Trump himself.
As various officials have described it, the United States will intervene only when chemical weapons are used — or any time innocents are killed. It will push for the ouster of President Bashar Assad of Syria — or pursue that only after defeating the Islamic State. America’s national interest in Syria is to fight terrorism. Or to ease the humanitarian crisis there. Or to restore stability.
The latest mixed messages were sent Monday in both Washington and Europe. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson — during a stop in Italy on his way to Moscow for a potentially tense visit, given Russian anger at last week’s missile strike — outlined a dramatically interventionist approach.
“We rededicate ourselves to holding to account any and all who commit crimes against the innocents anywhere in the world,” Tillerson said.
Hours later, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said at his daily briefing that Trump would act against Syria not just if it resorted to chemical weapons, like the sarin nerve agent reportedly used last week, but also when it used conventional munitions.
“If you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb into innocent people, I think you will see a response from this president,” Spicer said.
For Trump, who came to office espousing an “America first” policy that stayed out of the affairs of other countries where the United States had no interest of its own, responding to barrel bombs in Syria or to “any and all” humanitarian abuses “anywhere” would be a far more sweeping standard for U.S. leadership.
If anything, it sounds more like the activist advisers around President Barack Obama who pushed for more intervention to protect civilians in various conflict zones.
Just as likely, analysts said, neither Tillerson nor Spicer really meant it or, possibly, fully understood the potentially farreaching consequences of what they were saying. Unlike chemical weapons, barrel bombs — generally oil drums filled with explosives — are used with vicious regularity in the Syrian civil war. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the government dropped 495 barrel bombs in March alone, and 12,958 in 2016.
By the end of the day Monday, fearing that a new “red line” had been drawn, the White House sought to unwind Spicer’s comment. “Nothing has changed in our posture,” officials said in a statement emailed to reporters. “The president retains the option to act in Syria against the Assad regime whenever it is in the national interest, as was determined following that government’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens.”
The confusion was only heightened when The Associated Press quoted an unidentified U.S. official saying that Russia had known about Syria’s chemical attack in advance.
With all the murky signals, Trump has done little to clarify how he will proceed after firing Tomahawks at a Syrian air base in retaliation for the chemical attack, which killed more than 80 civilians.
While his Cabinet and other advisers seem to be reading from different talking points, the president has not spoken publicly about Syria since the missile strike Thursday night.
Even his famed Twitter feed has largely avoided the subject, beyond thanking military personnel.
The only substantive comment he has made on Twitter about the situation was to defend against critics who asked why the runway at the air base had been left untouched. “The reason you don’t generally hit runways is that they are easy and inexpensive to quickly fix,” he wrote Sunday.
The resulting vacuum has left world leaders and U.S. lawmakers scratching their heads over how the United States will proceed now that it has taken direct action against Assad’s government for the first time in Syria’s 6-year-old civil war.