WASHINGTON — In launching a military strike just 77 days into his administration, President Donald Trump has the opportunity, but hardly a guarantee, to change the perception of disarray in his administration.
The attack will also shape the meeting next week between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and President Vladimir Putin of Russia — the first face-to-face encounter between the Russian leader and a member of the Trump administration.
Before the strike on a Syrian air base Thursday night, the meeting had been expected to be dominated by the investigation into Russia’s cyberattacks and the interference in the presidential election on Trump’s behalf.
But the Syria action gives the Trump administration an opportunity to demand that Putin either contain or remove Syria’s leader, Bashar Assad, or else Trump will expand the limited U.S. military action — and quickly — if the Russian president fails to do so.
The Syrian government’s chemical attack against rebel-held territory forced the administration’s hand, said Antony J. Blinken, deputy secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
“We do have to act,” Blinken said just hours before Trump launched the attack.
“This goes beyond Syria,” he said. “Assad was going against a norm we have observed since World War I,” when chemical warfare was first used on a widespread basis.
Many of Obama’s senior aides, Blinken among them, argued for similar action in late summer 2013, when Obama stepped up to the red line he had created regarding Assad’s use of chemical weapons.
Rather than taking the action he had threatened, Obama followed up — with Russia’s help — to force Assad into an agreement to ship much, but clearly not all, of Syria’s chemical stockpiles out of the country.
Later, Obama said he was “very proud of that moment” because he had stepped back from the Washington establishment’s warnings. Few of his top foreign policy advisers agreed.
During last year’s campaign, Trump argued strenuously that Obama’s decision at the time was a symbol of American weakness that should never be repeated. In that respect, the attack Thursday night was almost preordained.
But there are also considerable risks for Trump in the next few weeks, once the immediate satisfaction of making Assad pay a price for acts of barbarism wears off.
The first risk is that his gambit with Putin fails. The Russian leader may have strongly preferred Trump to his rival, Hillary Clinton, in the election. But Putin is not likely to enter into an agreement that threatens his influence over Syria, and thus his main foothold in the Middle East. Syria is home to Russia’s main military base outside its own borders.
A second risk is that Trump, in taking a shot at Assad, undercuts his own main goal in the region: defeating the Islamic State.
If Syria collapses, it could become a haven for Islamic terrorists, the exact situation that Trump is trying to prevent.
It is unclear whether Islamic State fighters, already put on the run months before Trump took office, are in any condition to exploit an even more splintered Syria. But as David H. Petraeus, the retired Army general who designed the Iraqi surge, often notes, one of the lessons of the past decade is that if a power vacuum is created in the region, some variety of Islamic extremists will exploit it.
The third risk is that Trump has no real plan to bring peace to Syria. The U.S.-led negotiations to create some kind of political accord — which was John Kerry’s mission for his final 18 months as secretary of state — collapsed.
Tillerson has shown no desire to start a new one. And Trump’s proposed budget makes cuts to the very programs that would provide relief to the homeless, beleaguered Syrians who have survived six years of civil war.
Clearly, the conflict that led Trump to take military action for the first time in his presidency is not the one he was looking for.
During his campaign, he dismissed the notion of humanitarian interventions, and in an interview with The New York Times last year, he could not define the conditions that would even tempt him to use the U.S. military to defend a foreign population from a vicious dictator. It simply did not fit his definition of defending “America first.”
But like many of his predecessors, Trump did not get to choose the events that led to his first use of significant force. The question is whether his new, untested team — divided in their own definitions of how and when to use American power — can turn the intervention in Syria into something more than a symbolic show of force.
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