Trump campaigned on getting us out of Syria.
It was also a sop to our allies in the Gulf kingdoms, whose restive troglodyte populations really, really hate their rulers for allying with the Great Satan aka Uncle Sam, and would just as soon see us killed to the last man, woman and child. Now, some may prefer to see us nuking the Middle East till it glows, in the aftermath of a terror attack dwarfing 9/11. I don’t. I think this Cold War we have with the murderous Muslim majorities of the region, with the Arab rulers keeping a lid on things is a good thing. Because a Hot War with us killing them by the tens of millions with nukes would be far worse.
People rag on the Cold War but we emerged from it without tens of millions of dead on both sides. I’d say it was an era that achieved a good balance of deterrence and diplomacy, even though these factors weren’t always present at the same time. But deterrence needs to be fed from time to time with concrete demonstrations of both capability and willingness to act. That was what this rap on the knuckles was all about. Conduct a gas attack, and we will destroy hundreds of millions of dollars of your equipment.
You might remember this
After Mike Pence suggested in the vice presidential debate last fall that the U.S. should take a stronger stance against the Assad regime, Trump publicly dismissed this view, saying Syria is fighting ISIS. In an interview with the Guardian during the campaign, Trump said, What we should do is focus on ISIS. We should not be focusing on Syria.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-syria-strike-is-trumps-first-big-break-from-his-campaign-rhetoric/
You may be right about his reasoning but I agree with candidate Trump and not President Trump on this one.
Nice analysis, Zhang.