RUTHFULLY YOURS

America’s surgical strike on Syrian regime targets last Thursday night — and this Thursday’s “mother of all non-nuclear bomb” attack on Sunni terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — garnered surprisingly widespread bipartisan support, but put some of U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics in a bit of a rhetorical quandary. How could they word their defense of Trump’s bold yet not extreme warning shots without putting a dent in their distrust of the new occupant of the Oval Office?

Coming up with a solution to this problem turned out not to be so difficult for those pundits and politicians who have been paying close attention both to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people — most recently with chemical weapons — and to every syllable of Trump’s Twitter feed.

Their argument now goes that Trump’s latest military moves — and shift in attitude toward NATO — are examples of policy “flip-flopping” from the “isolationism” expressed in his inaugural address to a newfound global interventionism. They contend that a president who so drastically and swiftly shifts gears is perfectly capable of performing yet another about-face when the mood arises.

The trouble is that this assertion is both overly simplistic and inaccurate.

In the first place, Trump himself openly acknowledged that though he had said he was not going to intervene in Syria, he “changed his mind” when it was established that Assad was killing babies with sarin gas — after lying about having rid his country of chemical weapons. He has also openly declared war on the Islamic State group. This hardly constitutes a flip-flop. Instead, it indicates flexibility of thought and action on the part of a leader faced with a set of circumstances that warrants both.

The same goes for his statements on NATO, which he originally called “obsolete” and has since deemed necessary. His initial attack on the organization was that its members were not pulling their weight. This spurred them to make at least symbolic gestures, such as slightly increasing their budgets, to persuade him to reconsider. This is no small thing.

Listening to his campaign rhetoric, the last thing you would expect Donald Trump to do as president would be to escalate a ground war in the Middle East. He won the Republican nomination last year by campaigning against both George W. Bush’s war in Iraq and Barack Obama’s war in Libya.

But as Trump’s young presidency has shown, many of the candidate’s foreign policy positions are not as firmly held as his supporters had hoped. It’s not just that Trump struck the Syrian regime after last week’s chemical weapons attack on rebels. It’s not just his recent reversals on Chinese currency manipulation and the NATO alliance. The president’s biggest foreign policy surprise may be yet to come.

Senior White House and administration officials tell me Trump’s national security adviser, General H.R. McMaster, has been quietly pressing his colleagues to question the underlying assumptions of a draft war plan against the Islamic State that would maintain only a light U.S. ground troop presence in Syria. McMaster’s critics inside the administration say he wants to send tens of thousands of ground troops to the Euphrates River Valley. His supporters insist he is only trying to facilitate a better interagency process to develop Trump’s new strategy to defeat the self-described caliphate that controls territory in Iraq and Syria.

U.S. special operations forces and some conventional forces have been in Iraq and Syria since 2014, when Obama reversed course and ordered a new air campaign against the Islamic State. But so far, the U.S. presence on the ground has been much smaller and quieter than more traditional military campaigns, particularly for Syria. It’s the difference between boots on the ground and slippers on the ground.

Trump himself has been on different sides of this issue. He promised during his campaign that he would develop a plan to destroy the Islamic State. At times during the campaign he said he favored sending ground troops to Syria to accomplish this task. More recently, Trump told Fox Business this week that that would not be his approach to fighting the Syrian regime: “We’re not going into Syria,” he said.

The United States dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal yesterday on an Islamic State complex in the mountains of Afghanistan, a powerful indication that the Trump administration takes its responsibilities in the war against Muslim terrorism seriously.

This successful mission is part of President Trump making good on a campaign promise made in late 2015 to “bomb the shit out of” Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh). Yesterday the president referred to the military operation as “another successful job,” after acknowledging he trusted his generals in the field enough to delegate strike authority to them.

It is a welcome change after the Obama administration did little for years to combat Muslim terrorism and engaged in many activities that strengthened and emboldened terrorist groups. It also puts hostile regimes, like those in North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Russia, and Syria on notice that America’s new president is dramatically different from his predecessor.

“This president understands that diplomacy without force behind it is nothing,” Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the Trump White House counterterrorism guru, said on “The O’Reilly Factor” last night.

“It’s words. It’s pieces of paper. Statecraft and leadership are when you use these things together to reinforce each other.”

Trump, unlike Obama, refuses to lead from behind and play friendlies off against each other, he said.

What we have seen is eight years of divisiveness, of the Obama White House dividing our nation against itself, and dividing us against our allies and friends. And in just 84 days, President Trump has replaced divisiveness with decisiveness, whether it’s to do with the border, whether it’s to do with manufacturing, whether it’s to do with NATO, or whether it’s to do with our enemies in ISIS, or in this case, the chemical weapons attack [in Syria] last week, we have changed the geopolitical reality in the world in just a matter of weeks.

President Trump is serious about confronting the terrorist threat, Gorka said.

People now understand just how much the president means what he says. When he says – unequivocally – in front of a joint session of Congress, at CPAC, when he says I am going to obliterate ISIS, literally, when he says, I am going to wipe the Islamic State off the face of the earth, it’s not empty rhetoric.

“It’s stunning” if you read the memoirs of Obama’s defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, Gorka said.

The former Pentagon chiefs tell of National Security Council meetings that last “three to four hours with nobody taking a decision,” he said. “That was the last eight years. That was the reality of the red lines. Along comes President Trump, that’s gone. We have a threat. We’ve promised to deal with and we’re dealing with it right now.”