In America, it’s called turning on a dime.
At the beginning of the week, everyone in the Trump administration, from White House spokesman Sean Spicer to the ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, was a realist when it came to Syria.
With the war there in its seventh year, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was accepted as immovable and the focus was on eradicating Islamic State.
“When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority,” US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said at a Washington meeting of the coalition fighting IS. “We must continue to keep our focus on the most urgent matter at hand.”
As the week ended, we found Donald Trump invoking a community of civilised nations and Haley upbraiding Russia and Iran in the style of her predecessor Samantha Power, that great proponent of the global “responsibility to protect”.
The United States rediscovered its idealism. Or did it?
The realist argument was always that US blood and treasure should only be spent to prevent an IS takeover in Syria, and Washington’s worst case scenario: jihadists in control of the apparatus and resources of a state.
Trump suggested after authorising this strike that the use of chemical weapons anywhere constituted a threat to US national security, though beforehand we were led to believe it was the plight of innocent people such as children that had triggered this change of policy.
Read the full article by Maher Mughrabi at The Age.