Trump finally played a card with the Syria strike and it was a doozy – whether the messages were intended or not.
The past week saw the rhetoric of President Trump’s campaign messages meet the reality of the office he now holds. Stepping back a little further, April has been a very revealing month — if not somewhat cruel to President Trump’s more isolationist-leaning backers — in terms of what an emerging “Trump Doctrine” looks like.
Attaching the term “doctrine” to various past presidents’ policies is always somewhat of a misnomer as their actions are constrained by a variety of factors, including the unfeeling realm of geopolitics, and are informed by a bevy of inputs most of us could never even imagine.
Voters across the political spectrum were either terrified of, or enraged by, or ecstatic over the idea of a President Trump who would sharply reduce the United States’ global footprint and upend decades of long-standing formal and de facto relationships that have come to define the post-WWII era.
But any ideas of what a Trump foreign policy would or wouldn’t look like blew up earlier this month when nearly five dozen Tomahawk missiles struck the Syrian regime’s Shayrat airbase. So much for all the times candidate Trump decried foolish U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, amirite?Well, not so fast. The missile strike against regime forces in Syria was the very least President Trump could do and still reasonably claim he had done something. And there are zero signals that Washington is preparing to send U.S. ground troops en masse into Syria to fight against both the regime and various jihadi forces.
The reality is that the strike is important because it was the first tangible international action by the new President who has yet to clearly define his strategy and the world is taking notice. Here’s where we stand now:
- The Syrian regime in Damascus has been warned that any use of nerve agents or chemical warfare in the future risks triggering a U.S. strike. The actual impact the last strike had within Syria is still being debated as details from both the Syrian and US government are fuzzy, but the immediate diplomatic kerfuffle it caused with the Assad regime’s Russian backers was relatively short lived. The U.S.-Russian “deconfliction” line – meant to prevent conflicts from escalating – that the Russians suspended was restored a few days later, with none of the tension so lovingly built up during the previous administration any worse for the wear.
- On the last point, the Russians suddenly see a cost to their direct actions in Syria that has been palpably absent in recent years. But before you start bursting into renditions of “America, F#%$ yeah!” try and see this from the Russian perspective: your aging, limited military resources are now stretched incredibly thin from Ukraine to the heart of the Levant, and you have a tendency to see enemies across all borders. With the Americans again willing to fling ordinance about, things could get ugly fast.
- Trump’s ordering of the strike in Syria has implications outside of the Middle East as well. For China, the timing could not have been more awkward. As 59 Tomahawk missiles were being launched from U.S. ships in the Mediterranean, Trump was entertaining Chinese President Xi Jinping at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Following intimate conversations over a “big, beautiful” piece of chocolate cake, President Trump has decided that he will not label the Chinese as currency manipulators after all, but the Chinese delegation is said to have left Mar-a-Lago agreeing to help eliminate the U.S. trade deficit and the North Korean nuclear threat.
- With all the explosions as of late (including the crater the Americans blew into Afghanistan’s Spin Ghar mountains last week via MOAB), the North Koreans are nervous that they’re next. Pyongyang’s decision to not test a suspected planned nuclear device over the weekend to coincide with the 105th anniversary of founder Kim Il-Sung’s birth could be seen in response to the U.S. Navy moving the USS Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group to the region. But back a desperate, anxious neurotic into a corner and you might not like what happens next…
- With all this ordinance on display, the U.S. has outlined, highlighted, and made bold what sort of capabilities will not be on the side of its NATO allies should they continue to fail to meet their funding obligations to the alliance. Trump has changed his tune recently regarding how NATO is no longer “obsolete,” but the new administration has made it crystal clear to both NATO and EU leadership that members can no longer expect US protection essentially for “free.”
