On Tuesday, April 4, reports emerged that the Assad regime hit the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Syria’s Idlib province with sarin gas, killing at least 85 people and wounding hundreds more. Within 63 hours, the United States launched 59 tomahawk cruise missiles at Shayrat Airfield, the site from where the chemical attacks were launched. This American military action, the first directed at the Assad regime since the Syrian uprising began six years ago, drew bipartisan praise from congressional leadership, the foreign policy establishment and allies in Europe and the Middle East. Others have voiced deep consternation about the strategic, legal and procedural implications of the strike.
Ultimately, President Donald Trump’s decision was the right thing to do. The United States sent an important signal that any wanton violation of an international norm banning the use of chemical weapons will exact a response. Its limited nature hopefully portends that the Trump administration will engage with restraint in the eventual formulation of a political solution to the Syrian civil war.
For six years now, the Assad regime has bombed, shot, starved, tortured and terrorized the Syrian people into submission, as the international community has documented its atrocities from the sidelines. Over 500,000 have been killed and almost 11 million displaced as the government, with crucial assistance from Russia and Iran, sought to obliterate the opposition from every inch of Syrian soil. The United States and its allies has repeatedly combined diplomacy and limited military assistance to a restricted number of rebel groups in the hopes of reaching a negotiated settlement to the conflict. Each and every attempt failed. Former President Barack Obama’s widely-noted “red line” gaffe, in which he chose not to follow through on his threat of force in response to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, captured his administration’s wider reluctance to get involved in the conflict.
That hesitancy was right at the time, and its strategic underpinnings remain correct. The Obama administration was under significant pressure to retaliate against the Assad regime with overwhelming force in response to the massacre. This would have crippled the Syrian government’s capacity to maintain control over its then-dwindling territorial holdings, which then most likely would have resulted in massive sectarian bloodletting in the Alawite coastal regions. The United States would have engendered a repeat of the Libyan intervention — the destabilization of an entire country for humanitarian purposes.
The battlefield situation is markedly different today. Since the late September 2015 Russian intervention on Assad’s behalf, the rebels have been steadily losing ground, culminating in December of last year with the fall of eastern Aleppo. Assad has every battlefield advantage at this point, controlling most of “usable Syria” and enjoying the support of two patrons who have staked their international credibility on the success of his regime. The Trump administration’s action last Thursday in no way changes this base calculus. The president, with rare wisdom, decided on the most limited of the military options laid before him. The strategic restraint his decision evinces — avoiding any direct threat to the Assad regime’s staying power — struck exactly the right balance.
What it does do, however, is send the Assad regime and rogue states around the world a clear message that the United States will not sit idly by as a fundamental international norm is violated with impunity. This assertion of American power is critical in the wider context of an unraveling liberal international order. It will have lasting effects on the decision-making processes in Damascus, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing and Pyongyang at exactly the moment when such a shock is needed.
As always with this president, there are deeper concerns. The legal basis for this strike against Syria is shaky, if not completely ungrounded. The commander-in-chief enjoys a wide latitude in the formulation and conduct of foreign policy, and his action is in line with those of his predecessors. This does not mean that it was necessarily legal.
Internationally, this was in breach of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which restricts the use of force against another sovereign state to situations of self-defense or with the authorization of the U.N. Security Council. This, it seems, is one of those instance where moral and legal legitimacy diverge, similar to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Furthermore, the administration’s lack of any strategic explanation for the strike and the ensuing mixed messaging speaks to dysfunction and uncertainty on the National Security Council. The hastiness of the strike and the sudden shift in American policy toward Syria are telling of a president with the impulse control, discipline and foresight of a child. The action itself was right, but the way in which it came about speaks to greater difficulties ahead.
Olivier Weiss is an Opinion columnist at The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
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