“We
cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy for all the bombs and guns we may heap
up in our arsenals than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country.
Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source”.
Adlai
Stevenson
Washington DC, 7 April. What
are the strategic implications of President Trump’s decisive but limited
missile strike yesterday against a remote desert airstrip in Syria? Ironically,
I spent much of yesterday in the White House, and elsewhere in DC, discussing
US foreign and security policy, including Syria. There is no question that the
loosing of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles by two US warships in the Eastern
Mediterranean marks a change from the policy of the Obama administration, but
to what extent? Is the strike an emotional response by President Trump to this
week’s disgusting footage of children dying in chemically-induced agony, is it
an act to deter Assad from further use of toxic weapons, or is it the start of
a new phase of US engagement?
My sense of the state of the
Administration’s putative foreign and security policy today is that it is again
a work in progress. Talking to senior Americans
across a political divide that runs through this city far wider and deeper than
the mighty River Potomac is that the Administration is slowly moving towards a
some form of concept for global engagement/grand strategy…even if thinks it is
not. The primary impulse of President Trump in ordering the strikes was to
punish Assad for a blatant use of ‘CW’ against his own people. However, by
simply reinstalling some of President Obama’s tattered and faded red-lines, but
not defining what or where they are, President Trump has already forced both
Damascus and Moscow off-balance.
In Syria itself the implication
is that the fight against Assad might now be accorded the same status as the
fight against Islamic State (IS). Moscow clearly understands that which is why
today Russia has suspended the agreement designed to ‘de-conflict’ air
operations by Russia and the US-led coalition. By implicitly raising the level
of risk to allied aircraft operating against IS Moscow hopes to relieve the
pressure on its client Assad, which overnight the Americans increased.
At the regional-strategic
level the strike has clearly reassured some American allies that unlike the
Obama administration the new White House will not talk itself constantly and
consistently into inaction. The Americans have certainly disturbed Tehran’s
composure. Washington seems also to have sufficiently impressed Ankara for Turkey’s
President Erdogan to back the strikes, thus suggesting President Putin will
need to work far harder to achieve his policy goal of detaching Turkey from
NATO. Still, the White House will need to be very clear-headed about what if
any policy outcomes it seeks in the regional-strategic chess-cum-rugby match
that is the Middle East and North Africa today.
It is at the grand
strategic level where perhaps the strikes perhaps resonate most profoundly. One
can almost palpably feel the disappointment/disturbance in Moscow that its concerted
effort to shape American policy is failing. One has to feel things about Moscow
today because the truth died some time ago in Russia. For a few years Moscow
has forced Washington on the back foot and forced Washington to answer a simple
but profound question; what are you going to do about us? It is a question Washington has been unable to
answer, thus sending the currency of US leadership into a nose dive. This
morning at least America is posing the same question; what are you Moscow going
to do about us?
Which brings me back to
the twin issues of US strategy and leadership. Right now the very uncertainty
over the Administration’s position has Putin, Assad and others holding their
breath. What will President Trump do next? Will he call the Putin-Assad bluff
and escalate further? Or, having returned a remote, secondary airstrip back to the
desert will Washington now stop? If it is the former then President Trump is
beginning a new era of American engagement and it will become rapidly clear
that the target audience of US action is allies and adversaries alike that
America means business (and I use that word advisedly). If it is the latter then
the aim of the strike will have been little more than to assuage the moral
outrage of the ‘something must be done but we are not sure what and why’ lobby
in the West. In which case, plus ca change…
Europe? This week the
French foreign minister called for the US to do more in Syria. Of course, the
language employed by the Quai D’Orsay was wreathed in the mist and mystery of
Talleyrand. The British were not far behind offering ‘full support’ to the US
short of doing anything. Oh, Britain, what have you become? One point I made in
the White House yesterday was that the Administration should be clear to its
European allies; if they want the US to act, then they too must act.
For all that after a week
here I do sense a profound shift in US policy is underway. First, President
Trump IS abandoning the neo-isolationism that marked much of his rhetoric
throughout the presidential campaign. That may have something to do with the
growing influence of Secretary of State Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis,
and National Security Advisor McMaster, who are beginning to hunt like a pack.
Second, the over-intellectualised nothingness of US foreign and security policy
under President Obama is being replaced by something far more rugged.
Which brings me in conclusion
to my core question; is this policy? After all, one missile strike does not a
policy make. The paradox of the Trump administration is that when one talks
privately to pivotal members of it, as I have done this week, one does get the sense
of serious work underway to reset US foreign and security policy and cast it
clearly into a series of hard-headed but realistic goals and desired outcomes.
What next? At some point
it would be nice for the Allie to hear just what that policy is. For the American
people, particularly those that backed President Trump, it will be interesting
to see what they think. Putin? Let’s see how he reacts.
Oh, and by the way,
President Xi of China has just landed.
Julian Lindley-French
