President Trump’s swift bombing of a Syrian airfield responsible for a chemical attack has been praised by our allies and even by Democrats. The mere fact that Trump followed up his condemnation of a sarin gas attack with military action sends a signal that the U.S. is no longer the “weak, pitiful giant,” to use Richard Nixon’s phrase, that eight years of Barack Obama’s appeasement and retreat had left it. Such praise is deserved, but the bombing is just the start. The real question is, what happens next? What’s the strategic goal?
The effect of the attack on restoring American prestige is undoubtedly important. Obama’s foreign policy reflected the idealistic internationalism that dismisses such old-fashioned ideas as prestige. Modern progressive thinking holds that the use of force represents a foreign policy failure, and usually makes things worse by entangling the U.S. in escalation and quagmires. Non-lethal negotiated settlements are a better way to defuse conflict, and a national humility based on recognition of past neo-imperialist sins (see Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech) can make our rivals and enemies more amenable to “win-win” agreements.
Obama’s now infamous “red line” warning about Assad’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, a warning the Syrian butcher promptly violated, reflected this thinking. Rather than back up his bold words with force when Assad went ahead and used chemical weapons in the Ghouta region, Obama quickly accepted Russia’s offer to help him negotiate a deal: The U.S. wouldn’t bomb Syria if Assad surrendered his chemical weapons stockpiles to Russia. Despite domestic and international criticism of such an obviously feckless capitulation, Obama told a reporter last year that he is still “very proud of this moment.”
Of course the deal was negotiated in bad faith by Syria and Russia, and did nothing to stop the slaughter or the use of chemical weapons. Like the current deal with Iran, no one knew if the terms of the deal were being adhered to by Assad. Now we know that they weren’t, and that he retained significant stockpiles. Such duplicitous behavior is consistent with the long history of failed negotiated agreements that usually serve as a tactic for furthering an aggressor’s ends. And the failure of such “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes called them, damages a state’s credibility and prestige, emboldening other aggressors. That in a nutshell is the history of Obama’s foreign policy, which has been a huge success for Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and the myriad jihadist outfits swarming out of the Libya that our thoughtless intervention turned into a jihadist jungle.
So bombing the airfield is a necessary first step to restoring our credibility and concentrating the minds of our enemies and rivals. But it is only one step, and such a one-off by itself can often be an act of international public relations rather than a game-changer. Cruise-missile and drone attacks are dramatic and photogenic. They get media attention and make noise, but without a larger strategic plan, they serve mainly to create the illusion of action in the absence of a lack of will to use decisive force. Destroying some planes on one airfield, or killing an endless series of al Qaeda “number two” leaders has little strategic value. New war planes can be bought, and al Qaeda has an endless supply of potential “number twos.”