Trump is breaking all of Obama's rules in Syria — and it seems to be working

        

As US President Donald Trump enjoyed chocolate cake with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April, he ordered the military to do something his predecessor hadn't dared: directly strike Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

Trump, a political neophyte then inside his first 100 days in office, attacked an ally of Russia and Iran after intelligence services concluded that Assad's forces had used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians, many of them children.

But Syria never fired back. Neither did Russia. And so far, Iran hasn't either. The salvo of 59 cruise missiles that took out a handful of Assad's warplanes went virtually unpunished.

The incident typifies the difference in Trump's and President Barack Obama's Syria policy, in which Trump seems to have successfully called Iran's bluff.

Obama was pressed by a similar situation in 2013, after evidence surfaced that Assad violated Obama's "red line" by using chemical weapons. Instead of following through on his threat to hit Assad in response, Obama agreed to let Russia step in and deal with the chemical-weapons stockpile.

Toward the end of Obama's term, it became clear why he had shied away from striking Assad: He was focused on the Iran nuclear deal.

"When the president announced his plans to attack [the Assad regime] and then pulled back, it was exactly the period in time when American negotiators were meeting with Iranian negotiators secretly in Oman to get the nuclear agreement," Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon told MSNBC last year.

"US and Iranian officials have both told me that they were basically communicating that if the US starts hitting President Assad's forces, Iran's closest Arab ally ... these talks cannot conclude," Solomon continued.