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.
No comments:
Post a Comment