Trump Is To Blame For The Syria Strikes — But So Are Democrats

The person principally responsible for any initiation of military hostilities is the person who directly initiates them. In the case of yesterday’s strikes against the Syrian government, that person is Trump. Whatever the fallout of the strikes might be — and they could be extremely dire — he’s the one who will rightly bear the resulting blame.

However, presidents don’t operate inside vacuums. They are products of the political climate of their time. Every week since his inauguration, Trump has been dogged by escalating accusations from Democrats that he is “compromised” by Russia, or that he has some kind of secret arrangement with the Russian government that constitutes literal treason. His closest confidants are under extreme scrutiny for simply meeting with anyone who might be identified as “Russian-tied,” even if their connections to the Russian state are barely tangential. Merely speaking to a Russian official, once considered routine and expected business for carrying out foreign affairs, is liable to get Trump representatives added as a “dot” to one of the ever-expanding charts full of convoluted “connections” that have proliferated across the internet, conjured up by everyone from blatant Twitter grifters to the Washington Post.

As I’ve written repeatedly before, these dynamics conspired to impose perverse incentives on Trump, whereby the onus was on him was to demonstrate his independence from Putin. One way of doing this would be to take rash military action against Russia’s client state, the Assad government. That, evidently, is exactly what has happened.

Perhaps most chilling about this ordeal is how quickly the “war machine” launched into high gear: The purported chemical-weapons attack occurred on Tuesday, administration officials completely reversed course in their stated attitudes toward the Syrian conflict on Wednesday, and by Thursday the US was launching air strikes against targets controlled by Assad. That’s almost the definition of “rash.” There was no time for a proper investigation as to the cause of the chemical weapons incident, hardly anything was litigated in the media or Congress, and now an act of war has been committed against a foreign state with no legal grounds whatsoever.

Democrats who spent the past many months screaming about how Trump had “cozied up” to or was “in bed” with Putin have apparently gotten their wish: Russian government officials have strongly denounced Trump’s incursion, calling it “aggression against a sovereign government” (which is plainly true) and responded by suspending a critical military communication link meant to avert any unintentional confrontations between US and Russian forces. The Russian foreign minister, Lavrov, has reasonably suggested that the stated rationale for the attack — Trump’s claimed concern for slain children — was transparently pretextual:

Does anyone seriously believe that Trump was so genuinely moved by the deaths of Syrian children that he felt a deep-seated moral compulsion to act? He was apparently watching TV and saw some sad images, and this was enough to move him to jettison every campaign pledge regarding Syria and initiate a brisk attack before most anyone could even get their bearings. If Trump’s principal impetus for launching the attack was to seize on an opportunity to demonstrate that he is not, in fact, a pawn of Putin, then the blame lies with him for taking potentially catastrophic military action for such petty, performative reasons.

But less directly, there is blame to be borne by Democrats for fostering such a blinkered, warped domestic political climate, whereby Trump exhibiting his sufficiently-hostile attitude toward Russia was taken to be the savvy and expedient thing for him to do. Dems’ longstanding demands for attacking Assad have finally been realized; Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi among others have all cheered the strikes. Will this put to rest the always overblown “compromised by Russia” narrative? The more deluded dead-end espousers of that theory will likely never give it up, and lots of Democrats are too committed to finally unearthing the vaunted “smoking gun” to ever truly move on, but maybe now the facts will force a revaluation.

How can Trump simultaneously be a pawn of Russia, and also be bombing Russia’s client state, which had just made significant tactical headway and looked poised to soon finally terminate “the rebels” as a viable opposition force? There’s sure to be someone out there who can furnish a convoluted explanation for why that should still be considered a live theory, but they’re looking increasingly foolish and desperate.