Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said late Thursday that Russia “failed in its responsibility” to locate and destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, hours after President Trump authorized dozens of airstrikes against the Assad regime.
“Clearly Russia has failed in its responsibility to deliver on that commitment from 2013,” Tillerson told reporters at Mar-a-Lago. “Either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent in its ability to deliver on its end of that agreement.”
Trump ordered a round of missile attacks against an airfield in central Syria late Thursday in response to a massive chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians that President Bashar al-Assad is believed to have been behind.
“It’s important to recognize that as Assad has continued to use chemical weapons in these attacks with no response, with no response from the international community, he, in effect, is normalizing the use of chemical weapons, which may then be adopted by others,” Tillerson said.
In remarks Thursday evening, Trump encouraged U.S. allies to “join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria.”
“It’s important that some action be taken on behalf of the international community to make clear that these chemical weapons continue to be a violation of international norms,” Tillerson added.
Tillerson said “a number of elements” led Trump to call authorize the cruise missiles Thursday night. He said the strike was “proportional” because it targeted the site from which the chemical attack originated.
“I would tell you that the response from our allies, as well as the region and the Middle East has been overwhelmingly supportive of the action we haven taken,” he said.
Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the administration carefully deliberated its options, including “the risk associated with any military action” in Syria.
“There were three options we discussed with the president, and the president asked us to focus on two options in particular, to mature those options, and he had a series of questions for us that we endeavored to answer,” McMaster told reporters.
Trump met with his national security team immediately after the attack earlier this week and again during a briefing this afternoon. A Pentagon spokesperson told the Washington Examiner that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis arrived at Mar-a-Lago earlier Thursday to deliberate options with the president, who was hosting a summit in Florida with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“After a meeting of considerable length and a far-reaching discussion, the president decided to act and that’s the general sequence of events,” McMaster said.
