It may be that in ordering the U.S. military to attack a Syrian air base, Donald Trump made the right decision for the specific reasons his administration is giving: to punish President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons this week against his own people, and to deter Assad from using them again. But the thing is, we can’t possibly know yet if this was the right decision; all we have is this single, violent move. We will only know if it was successful if Assad never uses chemical weapons again, if Donald Trump pursues the many diplomatic moves necessary to support this policy, and if it doesn’t end up contributing to the overall dynamics of violence, disarray, and increasing chaos in Syria that the United States is presumed to oppose. This a lot of ifs beyond a single feel-good moment of kicking a little Assad ass.
Of course, we don’t even know if the reason the president has given for launching the attack is actually the real reason. This is because Donald Trump has proven himself to be a man who thrives on lies, who lives as unquestioningly within a circuit of lies as an innocent pig wallowing in its own personal hog heaven of mud and muck. He and his appointees have spent the first months of his administration systematically degrading our ability to actually believe a single word that comes out of their mouths: from obsessive quibbles over inauguration crowd counts, to the lie that President Obama wiretapped him, to whether or not Donald Trump supported holding a vote on health care (news flash: he did), lies have been as much the coin of the Trumpian realm as in any tinpot dictatorship out of a Marx Brothers-meet-Charlie Chaplin fever dream. Can we really trust that the stated reasons for the attack are the real ones?
Then there’s the broader context of this attack: first off, the 24-hour-a-day disaster that is the Trump administration. It’s fresh off failures on its anti-Muslim travel ban and Obamacare repeal, and is mired in the Russian election interference investigation. This administration is such a bundle of damaged goods that any seemingly decisive action it takes in foreign policy has to be looked at with extreme skepticism, as a possible effort to change the conversation.
Other factors amplify the need for such skepticism. Former Clinton-era state department official James Rubin points out that only days before the attack, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley signaled that Assad’s removal from power was not a priority for the United States. This was followed by Secretary of State Tillerson and spokesperson Sean Spicer seconding her view. The U.S. had also turned its back on Syrian refugees through Trump’s travel ban, suggesting American indifference to the plight of ordinary Syrians. As Rubin puts it, “The unsurprising consequence of this shift was a newfound confidence within the Assad regime that it need not worry about paying a heavy price if its forces committed new acts of barbarity aimed at demoralizing the nation’s remaining rebels.”
The Trump administration is pressing a narrative of Trump’s decisiveness and toughness, but this episode equally raises a storyline of catastrophic missteps by Trump followed by a hasty, ill-thought-out response to Syria’s chemical attack. So why are so many people praising the missile attacks when Trump’s incompetence in the first place may well have cleared the way for this chemical attack? It is natural and justified to feel hate against Assad, and to want revenge for what he’s done to his own people: but the satisfaction that supporters of the strike are feeling is being dangerously decontextualized from story of the mistakes Trump may have made. Joan Walsh of The Nation has an excellent article on the Syria attack, and among other things she notes that “any liberal who praises these missile strike has to account for what comes next.” She points out that Trump’s lack of care about diplomacy is well known, which I will interpret as another way of saying that it’s a little bit crazy to praise a single action by Trump when we know full well that he’s likely not capable of the follow-up actions to make this missile strike meaningful in terms of stopping Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
This attack should also be viewed with serious skepticism in light of the Russian factor: not just the Russian interference in our election and possible collusion between Trump campaign officials and this effort — and Trump’s need to distract us from this — but also the fact that the Russians are active in Syria in support of Assad. A danger that has been theoretical up to now has become uncomfortably possible: that Trump might act dangerously aggressively toward the Russians as a way to mitigate the perception that he was only elected through Vladmir Putin’s assistance. Putting aside the question of what the hell either nation is doing in Syria in the first place, the idea that Russia and the U.S. both have combat forces in the same country, sometimes in support of opposing factions, rightly strikes the dispassionate observer as batshit crazy. The U.S. warned Russia that the attack was coming, I assume to minimize the possibility of Russian casualties; but the fact that there could have been Russian casualties suggests a recklessness to Trump’s action that has not been adequately considered either by politicians or in the news coverage.
The Donald Trump who launched these attacks is the same Donald Trump whose temperament, moral turpitude, inexperience, and authoritarianism make him unfit for the presidency. The one question to be answered is this: do you trust Donald Trump to take the complicated, delicate, and difficult steps needed to prevent future gas attacks, let alone bring the Syrian civil war to a close? If the answer is no, then it makes no sense to support this one-off attack. This is the same sort of context-free approval that has already gotten us into so many problems around the world to begin with. A related point: President Obama chose not to respond militarily when Assad launched a previous gas attack against his own people. Are opponents of Trump who nonetheless support Trump’s action here really so sure that Trump made the right decision, and Obama did not?
It seems probable that Donald Trump will draw all the wrong lessons from these missile strikes. Some of the same dark traits that make him unfit for the presidency — a lust for vengeance, an ignorant belligerence, a limitless craving for approval — will drive him to use military force again, and again, based on the positive response he got with his Syria attack. This is just the beginning. Anyone who opposes this insane presidency is likely to regret cheering on the missile strike these last few days.
In the way that these strikes have at least temporarily reset the conversation around Trump, and led to support from otherwise skeptical quarters, we can see the rough shape of a strategy whereby Trump eventually wins re-election to become a two-term president. A cynical take on what happened in Syria is that he created a problem that he then purported to solve, using the broad discretion accorded the president as commander-in-chief. Many commentators had previously noted the risk of Trump using military conflict to distract the public or rally it behind him. This missile strike shows how easily this can be done, at least in terms of the president’s ability to order military action with little or no Congressional restraint.
It’s not like we haven’t been here before. Exhibit A is the presidency of George W. Bush; after all, how else did Bush get re-elected but by turning his catastrophic failure to defend the U.S. against the attacks of 9/11 into a reason to vote for him, in the form of the ill-conceived war on terror and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq?
