What are we to make of the cruise missile barrage that targeted a Syrian air base in retaliation for Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in the province of Idlib? Was Donald Trump’s first serious action as commander-in-chief a one-off expression of moral outrage lacking any larger purpose? Or is there something more strategic afoot?
The president is a mercurial man, to put it mildly, for whom the political is personal. In announcing the cruise missile strikes, his posture was that of the avenging angel, not the dispassionate defender of national interest. He only lightly touched on the question of proliferation before explaining what truly moved him: “Using a deadly nerve agent, Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children,” the president said with dirge-like cadence, reading awkwardly but emotionally from a teleprompter. “It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” The contrast from his typical small-hours tweeting tone could hardly have been greater.
But whatever the president’s motivation, there’s a good case to be made that, at least in regard to the Middle East, a coherent approach is emerging from the administration. This represents both a reversal from the Iran-first gambit of the Obama years and a reaffirmation of the traditional U.S. strategy that held sway from Jimmy Carter in 1979 through George W. Bush in 2009. As Lord Ismay might have put it: Americans in, Russians out, Iranians down. That is, the United States would lead a stabilizing coalition of Sunni powers and Israel rather than subcontracting to regional powers, do its best to exclude meddling by outsiders, and, especially in the wake of the Khomeini revolution, suppress Iran’s desire for hegemony.
The evidence that we’re seeing a revival of this strategic tradition has been steadily mounting. To begin with, in Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and new National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, Trump has picked lieutenants both steeped in this strategy and successful in adapting it to changing conditions in the region. But there’s also evidence of administration actions that point in such a direction.
Yemen is a good place to begin a scan of the Trump-Doctrine horizon. And, but for the outrages in Syria, it is perhaps the most misbegotten and miserable product of Obama’s withdrawal from the region; this is what a war run by a Saudi Arabia untethered from America looks like. It’s also been a generous gift to Iran, which, at virtually no cost, has been transforming the previously rag-tag Houthi opposition into Hezbollah on the Arabia Peninsula. Now the Pentagon is weighing plans to try to help the Saudis at least stop digging themselves into a deeper hole.
Indeed, it is in Riyadh, even more than in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, that the Trump Turnaround is most fervently anticipated and prayed for. It’s hard to empathize with the House of Saud, but Barack Obama seemed to loathe the royal family as much as he does Bibi Netanyahu, to the point of gratuitously insulting them publicly and at length in his interview with Atlantic magazine correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg. The Saudis are so pleased with Trump and his team that they’re even trying to rebuild relations with Iraq, recently dispatching their foreign minister—for the first time since 1990—to Baghdad and returning a permanent and apparently competent ambassador. Notably, that’s a step the Saudis wouldn’t take for George W. Bush, even under constant urging.
But it is also in Baghdad that the Trump Turnaround will be tested. The long-running battle to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second city, is nearing its denouement. The ISIS stronghold in the western part of the city, that is its Sunni Arab neighborhoods, is isolated, and Iraqi forces have begun to probe their way in. This has required an increase of American military help, not just measured in trainers and air strikes but also in combat advisers, “boots on the ground.” Which is also to say that neither the regular Iraqi army nor irregular Shiite militias were quite up to the task; nor were Kurdish peshmerga dumb enough or strong enough to join in. As the Russians did in Syria, Americans in Iraq have again underscored the limits of local and proxy forces, including those provided by or through Iran. The challenge will come in a post-Mosul, post-ISIS Iraq, and the question is whether the Trump team can translate the battlefield success into the basis for lasting political influence, or if it has the patience to do so rather than to tweet “Mission Accomplished.”
By 2009, at three decades’ cost in blood and treasure and despite repeated strategic missteps, the United States had lurched into a commanding position across the Middle East and laid the groundwork for what might have been a longer period of stability and—if the Green Revolution and the Arab Spring had any greater meaning – an opportunity to nourish seedlings of liberty. But, declaring an “end” to America’s willingness to fight for the future and pronouncing this precarious peace to be self-sustaining, Obama walked away, with consequences such as the gassing of Idlib.
Whether these ghastly images have put Donald Trump on a Damascene road is not yet knowable. But among his sobering statements the other evening was this: “I now have responsibility.” The al-Shayrat strikes were more than symbolic, or at least differently symbolic. Trump fired nearly 60 Tomahawks at the Syrians, whereas the raid on the 1998 Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum that was thought to house chemical weapons facilities was just 13 missiles. Where Bill Clinton was content with a “pinprick” in Sudan, Trump thwacked the Syrians with a two-by-four.
Finally, the strikes aren’t exactly what you would describe as “collusion” with Vladimir Putin. For all the huffing and puffing about Trump & Co. as Russian stooges, administration policy has been not just traditionally hard-line but increasingly so. While Russian forces were warned of the strikes ahead of time and the military apparently avoided hitting any Russian aircraft that might have been left at Shayrat, Trump just crossed a second Obama “red line” that should turn more than a few Russian heads, maybe even a few Democratic Party heads.
