President Trump and his French counterpart-slash-friend Emmanuel Macron pledged a joint response to Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons attack on Saturday, which targeted civilians in Douma, Syria.
That means it is highly likely that the U.S. and France will conduct reprisal military strikes this week, perhaps with the support of British Prime Minister Theresa May. As Stephen Bush notes at the New Statesman, May has the votes to win parliamentary support for strikes even if opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn’s bloc votes against action.
The focus of the strikes will likely be on degrading Assad’s air and chemical weapons forces. The Syrian Air Force has numerous bases near Douma that might be targeted, but other chemical weapons units and depots are located across the country. The operative question is what strategic effect Trump and Macron will seek. While the action will have to be more functionally effective than the March 2017 U.S. strikes on a Syrian air base, the two leaders may want to balance the strikes against the fact that they will aggravate Russia.
Conversely, both Trump and Macron seem to believe — rightly, in my opinion — that this is a critical moment for reasons far beyond Douma’s dead. It’s a moment of precedence as to whether chemical weapons can be employed with impunity.
To that end, I expect the U.S. and France will target numerous facilities across Syria, including command and control structures and a large number of air bases. This effort will have to be wide-ranging because Assad will be moving his high-value assets to hardened locations, attempting to shield them from U.S. action.
How the strikes will be carried out is harder to say.
As Jamie McIntyre reports, the U.S. has a range of ship-based capabilities in the region that could launch cruise missile strikes similar to the March 2017 action.
The U.S. also has at least one cruise missile-armed submarine, the USS John Warner, in immediate or near-term striking range of Syria.
But if the U.S. and France want to impose significant costs on Assad, they’ll have to use aircraft . And that raises the question of interception by Russian jets acting in concert with the Syrian Air Force.
In my opinion, the U.S. and France should now reject Russian threats to allied aircraft and instead warn the Russians to evacuate any Syrian military bases beyond their headquarters at Tartus and Latakia. The U.S. could then conduct B-1B or B-2 strike operations under F-15/F-22/French Dassault Rafale fighter escorts.
The Russians could not contest those aircraft with confidence and know that we know this. As a caveat, Trump and Macron should also warn the Russians that if they attempt to move their S-400 air defense system to protect Syrian chemical assets, allied aircrews will respond to any threat engagement.
Ultimately, however, France and the U.S. must and will act here.
Assad has challenged Trump’s credibility (China and North Korea are watching) and, alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin, is undercutting international legal prohibitions against the use of chemical weapons. Beyond the moral concern of Syria’s civilian population, Assad has also challenged an underlying principle of U.S. national security: preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Trump must educate the dictator in his error.
