The United States is finally re-asserting itself internationally in a morally and unequivocally correct way with last week’s military strike against the Assad regime in Syria.
The images of dead and dying children, their lives choked away by poisonous chemicals, moved President Trump to act. Although the murderous regime in Damascus is clearly not the only source of human suffering in the world, it nonetheless provided the impetus for a swift decision. The ongoing atrocities imposed by Assad on his own people remain limitless, but human suffering alone does not provide a sufficiently robust foundation to act. However, when our national interests intersect with human suffering, it is the right thing to do.
Without a stable Syria, extremism and terrorism of all kinds will continue to grow. Assad is fighting everything that challenges his family’s brutal rule. His singular focus on the resistance has facilitated the unbounded growth of ISIS: while Assad crushes his opposition, ISIS grows. In fact, Syria is a training ground for terrorists to gain experience in their evolving form of lawless war craft…bomb making, weapons proficiency, terror tactics and recruitment. The caliphate created by ISIS is a free-fire zone of brutality and inhumanity of epic proportions. Syria is a total mess.
President Trump has acknowledged that it’s his mess. Regardless of how America got here, he is embracing this disaster as his own. The cruise missile strike was successful. It had a narrowly defined and proportional military objective to strike the Syrian air base that conducted the chemical attack last week. The strike was not intended to collapse the regime, weaken Assad’s military, or deny him use of his Air Force. It was simply the first of what will likely be more efforts to further degrade Syria’s military and diplomatic relationships with Russia.
If not completely tired of propping up Assad, Putin is quickly tiring of the cost to Russia in maintaining their influence in the Middle East. Russia, and before that the Soviet Union, has always had a presence in the Middle East and the region has long been a nexus for east-west competition. The Syrian port of Tartus provides Russia an underrated and vital Mediterranean naval base. Russia’s military presence in Syria is all-encompassing and makes up the fabric of Syria’s military. The United States cannot easily separate Syria’s behavior from Russia’s – that’s why taking action in Syria is so important.
The strike in Syria was clearly designed to help unseat Assad, but our recent actions really have more to do with Russia than Syria. If not already obvious to the casual observer, there is no good reason why any nation would try to assist Assad’s brutality. Russia is at great risk by sticking by him and they know it. Their patience is running out.
Russia is losing the information war. They do not want out of the Middle East but Russia most certainly wants out of the Assad quagmire. Assad must go and Russia probably has no pre-conditions on the manner of his departure or his ultimate disposition…dead, in jail or on a beach somewhere. Where the United States and Russia might converge is on who and what’s next for Syria. We should try to find out how that common interest can be achieved.
Russia wants US military cooperation. Without giving away the crown jewels of our technology, it is in our best interests to figure out how we can make that happen. Putin knows that American military capabilities are far superior to his. The United States would crush Russia in a conventional fight, but that kind of engagement is not likely. It’s not in either of our interests for that to occur. Cooperation along the lines of influence and shared interests beats the alternative – for Russia certainly, but for the United States as well. We hold the cards and wrested the initiative away from Russia…finally.
Our actions in Syria have immense implications in the Far East, especially our emerging strategy to contain North Korean nuclear and missile developments. It may have been happenstance that the strike against Syria was ordered when Chinese President Xi Jinping (Pyongyang’s benefactor) was visiting President Trump in Florida, but what a gift for our President. The “gods of coincidence” were clearly working their magic last week.
President Trump swiftly decided to strike a brutal dictator in Syria who has zero regard for his people. The brutal dictator in North Korea, Kim Jung Un, who also has zero regard for his people, clearly got the message. Just this past weekend, the U.S. Navy’s Carl Vinson Carrier Battle Group was ordered to transit from Singapore to the Korean peninsula in case Kim misunderstood.
America is watching and is prepared to act.
The United States must cooperate with China to find a convergence of interests that has atrophied over the past decade. Shaping behavior in the regime in Pyongyang that reduces the risk of a nuclear accident is in the shared best interest of the United States and China. The rest of the world agrees.
It is the start of a more fulsome relationship with China. If events in Syria can positively influence the arc of our diplomatic engagements in the Far East, all the better for America, China, Russia, and our fight against extremism…finally.