Moan about Trump all you like, but his approach to Syria was always much more realistic than Hillary Clinton’s. ‘You are fighting Syria, Syria is fighting Isis, and you have to get rid of Isis,’ he said during his election campaign. ‘Now we’re backing rebels against Syria, and we have no idea who these people are’
War-whoops and loud applause from foreign policy establishments and their media supporters have greeted President Trump’s missile strike in Syria, the dropping of the world’s largest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan and the dispatch of a naval task force in the direction of North Korea.
This spurt in belligerence over the last week has as much to do with domestic American politics as any fundamental new development in the rest of the world. Trump needed to defuse the accusation that he was too close to President Putin and too tolerant of a Russian ally like Bashar al-Assad. The resort to military action was largely in keeping with the old Pentagon saying that “defence policy ends at the water’s edge”, meaning that it is politics inside, not outside the US, which is the real decision-maker. Läs artikel