Trump put Assad regime on notice
The video from a chemical attack had horrified viewers worldwide, but the war in Syria has reliably delivered many other atrocities for six years.
This reign or even rain of death, though, was enough to provoke a new U.S. president. No drawing red lines, no waiting until they’re crossed to painstakingly decide whether to fulfill a threat. With dozens of Tomahawk missiles, Donald Trump has disrupted the world’s long, inconclusive debate over what, if anything, to do about Bashar al-Assad.
This attack won’t dislodge Assad or help the all-butdefeated rebel forces take control of the fractured country. But if it diminishes his air power, it also could reduce his ability to poison, crush and dismember his own people. To an important extent, though, this attack is about more than Assad and questions of how to deal with a vicious despot. It’s about President Donald Trump. On a geopolitical plane, it tells Vladimir Putin that he isn’t the only president who’ll take risks in Syria.
The world’s rulers and diplomats aren’t accustomed to that sort of unilateral gambit from Washington. If Trump wanted to assert that he isn’t his predecessor, firing Tomahawks at a Russian ally’s air assets will make the distinction. Whatever the back-channel advance alerts to world capitals, Trump didn’t publicly signal to his adversaries that he would take military action on such-and-such schedule. Thursday was rife with rumors of an impending attack. But Assad likely was as surprised as the rest of us by the first missile’s impact.
On Wednesday, Trump had reacted angrily to the gassing of Syrians, including children and babies. He acknowledged that Assad crossed “many, many lines” and suggested that there would be repercussions. His administration carried forward that threat on Thursday. If Trump had done nothing but fume, the president at some point would have looked wobbly. Powerless.
In this case, of course, there is unfortunate history. In 2012, President Barack Obama declared his red line in the sand to Assad, but he didn’t follow through when Assad’s regime killed some 1,400 people in a chemical weapons assault on Damascus. That brought U.S. credibility into question. Trump likely made the calculation that if the Syrian government launched another despicable chemical attack on its own people, he was going to make an issue of it.
But what happens next? Will Assad take the hint and stop the use of chemical weapons banned throughout the world? Or will he, backed by Putin, again deploy his air force to bomb civilians? The conflict escalates from here or — not.
Pentagon planners famously war-game such scenarios. But the wily Assad is still in power six years after Obama famously said he “must go.” He’s withstood years of conflict and slipped the grasp of U.N. inspectors tasked with making sure he disposed of all of his chemical weapons. By continuing to use them, he’s mocked those who believed he had surrendered them.
No one, not Americans or any allies, knew how an untested commander in chief with a history of shooting from the lip would react to his first international crisis.
Now adversaries and allies will have to recalculate.