Trump’s Realist Syria Strategy
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The president’s goal is to avoid bailing out without getting sucked in.
The tangled politics of last week’s missile strikes illustrate the contradictions in Mr. Trump’s approach. The president is a realist who believes that international relations are both highly competitive and zero-sum.
Yet the rationale for the missile strikes was not realist but humanitarian and legalistic: Syria’s illegal use of chemical weapons against its own people demanded or at least justified the Western attacks.
Nevertheless, as is often the case with this unconventional administration, a pattern if not quite a strategy is beginning to emerge—one defined as much by what the president rejects as by what he seeks to accomplish. The administration’s approach looks and often is erratic, but beneath the rants and the posturing Mr. Trump seems to be working toward an approach to the Middle East that reflects the interplay of American politics and interests in a strangely coherent way.
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