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April 10, 2017 , ,
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson speaking with reporters at Palm Beach International Airport on Thursday. Mr. Tillerson’s comments on Sunday were far more critical of the Russian government under President Vladimir V. Putin than anything President Trump has said publicly.

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson is taking a hard line against Russia on the eve of his first diplomatic trip to Moscow, calling the country “incompetent” for allowing Syria to hold on to chemical weapons and accusing Russia of trying to influence elections in Europe using the same methods it employed in the United States.

Mr. Tillerson’s comments, made in interviews aired on Sunday, were far more critical of the Russian government than any public statements by President Trump, who has been an increasingly lonely voice for better ties with Russia. They seemed to reflect Mr. Tillerson’s expectation, which he has expressed privately to aides and members of Congress, that the American relationship with Russia is already reverting to the norm: one of friction, distrust and mutual efforts to undermine each other’s reach.

“This was inevitable,” said Philip H. Gordon, a former Middle East coordinator at the National Security Council who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Trump’s early let’s-be-friends initiative was incompatible with our interests, and you knew it would end with tears.” The Russians’ behavior has not changed, Mr. Gordon added, and they “are using every means they can — cyber, economic arrangements, intimidation — to reinsert themselves around the Middle East and Europe.”

Mr. Tillerson made it clear he agreed with that view, sweeping past Mr. Trump’s repeated insistence, despite the conclusion of American intelligence agencies, that there was no evidence of Russian interference in last year’s election. The meddling “undermines any hope of improving relations,” Mr. Tillerson said on ABC’s “This Week,” “not just with the United States, but it’s pretty evident that they’re taking similar tactics into electoral processes throughout Europe.”

Such tough talk will make Mr. Tillerson’s job even harder when he arrives Tuesday for the first visit to Moscow by a top Trump administration official. While he must offer sharp warnings to Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov and to President Vladimir V. Putin, if they meet — it was unclear whether such a meeting had been quietly arranged — he must also find a way forward with them to counter the Islamic State and then deal with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.

Yet as Mr. Tillerson arrived in Italy to meet with foreign ministers before going to Moscow, the administration was sending conflicting signals about its policy on Syria and the extent to which it would hold the country’s patron Russia responsible for continued violence.

Mr. Tillerson and the new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” said the American attack last week on a Syrian air base was intended solely to halt future chemical attacks, not to destabilize or overthrow the Assad government.

“What’s significant about the strike is not that it was meant to take out the Syrian regime’s capacity or ability to commit mass murder of its own people,” said General McMaster, who is new to the Sunday television circuit, “but it was to be a very strong signal to Assad and his sponsors that the United States cannot stand idly by as he is murdering innocent civilians.”

Neither man would commit to further military action in Syria even if Mr. Assad continued to kill civilians in large numbers by conventional means rather than with the chemical weapons that prompted Mr. Trump to reverse his stance on intervention. Instead, Mr. Tillerson said that defeating the Islamic State remained the first priority. Only then, he said, would he turn to a cease-fire process leading to elections, so that “the Syrian people can decide the fate of Assad.”

But the American ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, suggested that such a process was doomed as long as Mr. Assad was in power. “We know there’s not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen with Assad at the head of the regime,” she said on CNN. “If you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it’s going to be hard to see a government that’s peaceful and stable with Assad.”

That statement stood in contrast not only to Mr. Tillerson’s comments but also to Ms. Haley’s own remarks a week ago — before Mr. Assad carried out his latest chemical weapons attack on civilians — in which she insisted that his departure from office was not a diplomatic priority for the United States.

Still, the overall tone of suspicion and condemnation of Russia’s actions in Syria indicated that Mr. Trump’s top national security advisers were nudging him back to a more traditional Russia policy. During his days as the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, Mr. Tillerson received a friendship award from Mr. Putin, and he is aware of the suspicions surrounding those ties and has gone the furthest in the administration in separating himself from the Russian leader.

The challenges have only multiplied in recent days. The Russians, angry about the attack on the air base, have threatened to cut off a communication line that the American and Russian militaries have used to notify each other about air operations in Syria. And the attack has forced Mr. Putin into a tighter relationship with Mr. Assad, perhaps tighter than the Russian leader wants.

Ms. Haley, who, like Mr. Tillerson, is new to diplomacy, has also apparently concluded that a hard line toward Russia is the safest course. The contrast between her remarks and Mr. Trump’s warm words for Mr. Putin on the campaign trail — as well as his refusal to acknowledge Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election — has been striking.

The Trump administration’s Syria policy has been difficult to parse. Mr. Tillerson, in his first television appearances since taking office, seemed to describe two different strategic objectives: halting chemical attacks and ultimately negotiating a cease-fire. But he made it clear that he had no intention of backing a military intervention that would overthrow Mr. Assad. That suggested that as long as the dictator used conventional means to kill his own people — barrel bombs instead of sarin gas — the United States would keep its distance.

“I think what the United States and our allies want to do is to enable the Syrian people to make that determination” about Mr. Assad’s fate, Mr. Tillerson said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” — a line that was often used by his predecessor in the Obama administration, John Kerry. “You know, we’ve seen what violent regime change looks like in Libya and the kind of chaos that can be unleashed.”

Those remarks indicate that Mr. Trump does not yet have a grander strategy for Syria. Longtime Middle East experts said that might be a good thing.

“I for one am glad he does not have a fully thought-through strategy on Syria, because if he did, he’d probably get it wrong,” said Ryan C. Crocker, perhaps the most experienced American career diplomat in the region, and dean of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University.

“There are too many variables, too many unknowns,” he said, among them the expectation of American allies, including Saudi Arabia, that Mr. Trump should emphasize getting rid of Mr. Assad over defeating the Islamic State. 
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April 08, 2017 , , ,
Nikki Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, and Volodymyr Yelchenko, left, representative of Ukraine, at a Security Council meeting on April 7.
It has been a head-spinning week watching the Trump administration stumble into its first international crisis only to emerge with a transformed policy on the use of force in the Middle East, announced on Thursday with the unleashing of 59 sea-launched cruise missiles against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
While the limited missile strike was a commendable and overdue response to the use of chemical weapons and to countless other war crimes perpetrated by the regime in Damascus, the public performance of President Trump and his team throughout this tragic episode hardly inspires confidence. On the contrary, the administration demonstrated a dangerous degree of incoherence and inconsistency.
Consider the chronology. The debacle began with a remark by the new United States ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, in New York at the end of March. Despite a brutal six-year civil war in which Mr. Assad’s forces have been responsible for the deaths of about 200,000 civilians, and despite near universal opposition to his rule by leaders of the civilized world, Ms. Haley thought it was the right time to send a signal to Mr. Assad and his allies, Russia and Iran, that the new American president’s priority “is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out.” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson confirmed this new view, which Sean Spicer, the White House spokesman, described as a simple recognition of “political reality.” Intentionally or not, American policy with respect to the world’s worst military and humanitarian crisis had been changed dramatically.
The unsurprising consequence of this shift was a newfound confidence within the Assad regime that it need not worry about paying a heavy price if its forces committed new acts of barbarity aimed at demoralizing the nation’s remaining rebels. And sure enough, the Syrian Air Force soon began dropping nerve gas on civilian neighborhoods in an insurgent-held town in Idlib province.
Stunned by this atrocity, Mr. Trump and his team then reversed course. For months they have suggested that “America First” meant that the country should not become mired in the region’s civil wars and violent upheavals. But this week, Mr. Trump suddenly decided that the Assad regime’s latest outrage required a military response.
This was yet another dramatic turnabout. After having criticized President Barack Obama for over-involving the United States in Syria’s problems, President Trump, by using military force against the regime, has now gone further than Mr. Obama was willing to go.
Syria represents the most consequential public reversal by the administration to date, but it is certainly not the only one. Even before his inauguration, Mr. Trump raised doubts about the longstanding “one China” policy, only to endorse it weeks later. As a candidate and as president, Mr. Trump has made contradictory statements about NATO, even as his foreign policy team has busily reassured European leaders that the United States values its alliances with them. There had been talk of scrapping the Iran nuclear accord, but now there is talk of maintaining it, at least for now. Where the administration stands on any number of major issues can depend on the day of the week.
The administration’s inability or refusal to articulate — or even formulate — an overarching foreign policy beyond Mr. Trump’s nationalistic slogan “America First” and his plans to spend billions rebuilding the military are the major sources of the problem. But there are bureaucratic problems as well. The departure of Michael T. Flynn as Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser just weeks after the inauguration no doubt slowed the formulation of a coherent set of policies. Delays in filling senior leadership positions in the State Department and Pentagon surely haven’t helped.
The apparent disconnect between Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and the White House has also added to the disarray. Ms. Haley has articulated politically popular positions that conflict with the White House, taking a harder line on Russia and emphasizing the importance of human rights even as the White House has downplayed the issue. Whatever her motivations, the messages have been mixed. And that can only give heart to dictators who view inconsistency as weakness.
Most troubling is the way Mr. Trump has allowed, or perhaps encouraged, the creation of confusing lines of authority and alternative centers of power within the White House. Despite his recent removal from the National Security Council, Stephen Bannon, Mr. Trump’s top political adviser, remains an influential figure who is viewed warily by senior intelligence and national security officials. And Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, has emerged as the president’s foreign policy troubleshooter, playing a prominent role in the administration’s talks with China, visiting Iraq on a fact-finding trip and taking over the Middle East peace portfolio. These are jobs traditionally given to seasoned diplomats, something Mr. Kushner is not.
Regardless of which of these factors is most to blame for the incoherence of administration foreign policy, it is imperative that the president address the problem as soon as possible. Unlike in domestic policy, where nuances often matter less, small changes can have big consequences in foreign affairs. The White House needs not only to clarify its policies, but also to establish and enforce better controls over the public explanation of those policies, before more damage is done to the country’s reputation and alliances.
Fixing this problem is a straightforward matter of political power, will and discipline. The stock of the new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, is almost certainly sky high in the White House right now, given the bipartisan plaudits Mr. Trump has received for the missile attack, arguably the administration’s first unadulterated policy success. In normal circumstances, the national security adviser should be able to enforce the articulation of a consistent and coherent national security policy. But in this administration, General McMaster has his work cut out for him.
So does Mr. Trump. During the campaign and his first months in office, he has put down America’s moral leadership in the world while talking up dictators and strongmen, from Asia to the Middle East to Europe. Might his reprisal against the Assad regime for waging chemical warfare be a sign of a new respect for democracy? The world can only hope so.
James P. Rubin served as assistant secretary of state for public affairs during the Clinton administration.
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April 08, 2017 , , ,
The damage on Friday after a reported airstrike by the Syrian government in the rebel-held town of Douma, near Damascus. 


WASHINGTON — As he confronted a series of international challenges from the Middle East to Asia last week, President Trump made certain that nothing was certain about his foreign policy. To the extent that a Trump Doctrine is emerging, it seems to be this: don’t get roped in by doctrine.
In a week in which he hosted foreign heads of state and launched a cruise missile strike against Syria’s government, Mr. Trump dispensed with his own dogma and forced other world leaders to re-examine their assumptions about how the United States will lead in this new era. He demonstrated a highly improvisational and situational approach that could inject a risky unpredictability into relations with potential antagonists, but he also opened the door to a more traditional American engagement with the world that eases allies’ fears.
As a private citizen and candidate, Mr. Trump spent years arguing that Syria’s civil war was not America’s problem, that Russia should be a friend, and that China was an “enemy” whose leaders should not be invited to dinner. As president, Mr. Trump, in the space of just days, involved America more directly in the Syrian morass than ever before, opened a new acrimonious rift with Russia, and invited China’s leader for a largely convivial, let’s-get-along dinner at his Florida estate.
In the process, Mr. Trump upended domestic politics as well. He rejected the nationalist wing of his own White House, led by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, who opposes entanglement in Middle East conflicts beyond fighting terrorism and favors punitive trade measures against Beijing. And Mr. Trump, by launching the strike on Russia’s ally Syria, undercut critics who have portrayed him as a Manchurian candidate doing the bidding of President Vladimir V. Putin after the Kremlin intervened in last year’s election on his behalf.
Given his unpredictability, none of this means that Mr. Trump has pivoted permanently in any of these areas. The White House has prepared an executive order that the president may sign in the coming days targeting countries like China that dump steel in the American market. And Mr. Trump is sending Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Tuesday to Moscow, where he will have the additional task of trying to smooth over the rancor of recent days, in addition to exploring whether Russia could be a real partner in battling the Islamic State in Syria.
Moreover, the missile strike, in response to a chemical weapons attack, was intended to be a limited, one-time operation, and the president seemed determined to quickly move on. After announcing the attack Thursday evening, he made no mention of it Friday during public appearances, nor on Saturday during his weekly address. As of Saturday morning, the Twitter-obssessed president had not even taunted President Bashar al-Assad of Syria online, although he did thank the American troops who carried out the missile strike.
“Our decisions,” Mr. Trump said in the Saturday address, “will be guided by our values and our goals — and we will reject the path of inflexible ideology that too often leads to unintended consequences.”
That concept, flexibility, seems key to understanding Mr. Trump. He hates to be boxed in, as he mused in the Rose Garden last week while contemplating the first new military operation of his presidency with geopolitical consequences.
“I like to think of myself as a very flexible person,” he told reporters. “I don’t have to have one specific way.” He made clear he cherished unpredictability. “I don’t like to say where I’m going and what I’m doing,” he said.
That flexibility was a hallmark of his rise in real estate, and if critics preferred the word erratic, it did not bother Mr. Trump — it has since worked well enough to vault him to the White House. But now that he is commander in chief of the world’s most powerful nation, leaders around the world are trying to detect a method to the man.
“There is no emerging doctrine for Trump foreign policy in a classical sense,” said Kathleen H. Hicks, a former Pentagon official who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “There are, however, clear emerging characteristics consistent with the attributes of the man himself: unpredictable, instinctual and undisciplined.”
On Syria, Mr. Trump had mocked President Barack Obama for setting a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons and urged him not to launch a punitive strike against Syria after Mr. Assad crossed it in 2013. That attack, with a death toll of 1,400, dwarfed last week’s toll of 84. And just days before last week’s attack, Mr. Tillerson indicated that Washington would accept Mr. Assad’s remaining in power.
Indeed, critics, including Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, argued that Mr. Assad felt free to launch a chemical attack precisely because Mr. Trump’s administration had given him a green light.Russia, critics added, did not constrain Mr. Assad because it has had a blank check from an overly friendly Trump administration. And Mr. Trump’s efforts to bar Syrian refugees from the United States, they said, sent a signal that he did not care about them.
An injured child being treated after the strike. 

“President Trump seems not to have thought through any of this, or have any kind of broader strategy, but rather to have launched a military strike based on a sudden, emotional decision,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote in an article for The Huffington Post on Saturday.
Mr. Assad is not the only leader testing Mr. Trump. North Korea has test-launched missile after missile in recent weeks, almost as if trying to get Mr. Trump’s attention.
So far, he has been measured in his response, urging President Xi Jinping of China during his visit at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to do more to rein in North Korea. But national security aides have also prepared options for Mr. Trump if China does not take a more assertive stance, including reintroducing nuclear weapons in South Korea.
Mr. Trump’s action in Syria was welcomed by many traditional American allies who had fretted over Mr. Obama’s reluctance to take a greater leadership role in the Middle East, and feared that Mr. Trump would withdraw even more.
After the missile strike, Israeli news outlets were filled with headlines like “The Americans Are Back,” and European leaders expressed relief both that he had taken action and that he had not gone too far.
“We have learned that Trump is not so isolationist as many Europeans feared he would be — he appears to care about victims of a gas attack in Syria,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform in London. “We have learned that he understands that U.S. influence had suffered from the perception — which grew under Obama — that it was a power weakened by its reluctance to use force.”
That touches on another animating factor as Mr. Trump deals with foreign challenges — doing the opposite of whatever Mr. Obama did. Mr. Trump’s first instinct after the Syrian chemical attack was to blame Mr. Obama for not enforcing his red line, never mind that Mr. Trump had urged him not to at the time. Even as he announced the missile strike on Thursday night, Mr. Trump asserted that his predecessor’s handling of Syria had “failed very dramatically.”
Intentionally or not, though, Mr. Trump adopted language similar to that used by Mr. Obama and many other presidents in defining American priorities. While in the past Mr. Trump said the United States did not have a national interest in Syria, last week he said instability there was “threatening the United States and its allies.”
He also said that “America stands for justice,” effectively espousing a responsibility to act in cases of human rights abuses, as other presidents have at times.
Until now, Mr. Trump has largely eschewed such language. Just three days earlier, he had hosted Egypt’s authoritarian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and made no public mention of the thousands of people the Cairo government has imprisoned in a political crackdown.
“What is striking to me is a subtle yet clear shift away from the rhetoric of pure American self-interest narrowly defined, as espoused by candidate Donald Trump,” said Robert Danin, a former Middle East negotiator who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations. “What has emerged is a new language of American leadership in the world that we have not heard before from President Trump.”
Mr. Grant and others noted that the strike, coming as Mr. Trump shared a meal with Mr. Xi, could resonate in Asia as well, leaving North Korea to wonder whether the president might resort to force to stop its development of ballistic missiles.
But Ms. Hicks said Mr. Trump’s flexibility — or unpredictability — was itself “extremely risky.” If other countries cannot accurately predict what an American president will do, she said, they may act precipitously, citing the example of China’s extending its maritime claims in the South China Sea.
“Imagine if Donald Trump then took exception in ways they didn’t anticipate and major wars ensued,” she said. “Bright lines, derived from clear interests and enforced well, are generally best, and I don’t think Donald Trump likes to be constrained by bright lines.”
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April 07, 2017 , , ,
The Russian Navy frigate Admiral Grigorovich in the Bosphorus in Istanbul on Friday, on its way to the Mediterranean Sea

WASHINGTON — The American military strike against Syria threatened Russian-American relations on Friday as the Kremlin denounced President Trump’s use of force and suspended an agreement to share information about air operations over the country that was devised to avoid accidental conflict.

Mr. Trump’s hopes for improving ties with Moscow seemed at risk as both sides traded harsh words in a diplomatic confrontation reminiscent of the darkest moments of the last few years.

President Vladimir V. Putin’s office called the missile strike on Syria a “significant blow” to the Russian-American relationship while Trump administration officials suggested Russia bore some responsibility for the chemical weapons attack on civilians that precipitated the missile strike.

The strike demonstrated the potential dangers of Russian and American forces operating in proximity and American military planners acted to avert a direct conflict. Fewer than 100 Russian troops deployed in support of the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad were believed to be stationed at the Syrian air base targeted by American forces. An American official said the Russians on the ground were given just 60 to 90 minutes of advance notice that the cruise missiles were coming and were not advised whether to take shelter or flee.

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Although Russia did not deploy its air defense system in Syria against the American cruise missiles, it flexed its military muscles after the attack. The minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, said that Russia would bolster Syria’s air defense systems, and the Russian news agency Tass reported that a frigate would enter the Mediterranean Sea on Friday and would visit the logistics base at the Syrian port of Tartus.

American officials faulted Russia for not enforcing compliance with a 2013 agreement with Syria to eliminate all of its chemical weapons.

“Clearly, Russia has failed in its responsibility to deliver on that commitment from 2013,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said on Thursday night. “So either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent in its ability to deliver on its end of that agreement.”

Russia denied that Syria had any such weapons or that it was behind the attack in Idlib Province on Tuesday that left more than 80 people dead, an attack that Western officials have said was conducted with sarin, a lethal nerve agent. Moscow said the attack was a false pretext to launch an air assault against Mr. Assad’s government.

“The Syrian Army has no chemical weapons at its disposal,” said Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for Mr. Putin, blaming the gas attack on “terrorists.” Russia called on the United Nations Security Council to convene an emergency meeting and Mr. Peskov said Mr. Putin considered the missile strike a breach of international law.

Syria on Friday condemned the American strike as “a disgraceful act,” news agencies reported. A statement from Mr. Assad’s office said the cruise missile strike was the result of “a false propaganda campaign.” Syria has denied that it possesses chemical weapons.

The American cruise missile strikes hit Al Shayrat airfield and were aimed at Syrian fighter jets and other infrastructure. American officials said the chemical weapon attack was conducted from that air base. The Syrian Army said six people were killed.

A spokesman for the Russian military, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, issued a statement calling the military effectiveness of the American airstrikes “extremely low,” with just 23 of the 59 missiles landing on target.

The American missiles destroyed a warehouse of material and technical property, a training building, a canteen, six MIG-23 aircraft in repair hangars and a radar station, according to the Russian military. A Russian television reporter, Evgeny Poddubny, who was at the air base, said nine planes had been destroyed.

The strike plan was put together at the United States Central Command in Tampa, Fla., over a 48-hour period. When Defense Secretary Jim Mattis met with Mr. Trump on Thursday in Florida, where the president was hosting China’s visiting president, the options had already been winnowed down to a Tomahawk cruise missile strike at Al Shayrat.

American intelligence agencies, they said, monitored the Syrian attack and mapped the radar tracks showing how Syrian warplanes left and returned to the base.

Two American destroyers, the Porter and the Ross, were already in position in the eastern Mediterranean. But there was a window during which the middle-of-the-night attack was deemed most likely to minimize civilian casualties, and the question for Mr. Trump was whether to go ahead or wait another day. Mr. Trump opted to go ahead.

The presence of Russian military personnel near the airfield complicated the decision. Given their presence, American officials said they must have known or turned a blind eye to the Syrian chemical weapons. American officials used the communications system previously set up to avoid conflict to notify the Russian forces on the ground. The conversation was described as lengthy, with the Russians doing much of the talking.

The chemical assault on Tuesday struck the town of Khan Sheikhoun, killing scores and sickening hundreds more. Turkey said on Thursday that sarin, a banned nerve agent, had been used in the attack, one of the worst atrocities of the Syrian war.

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Iran, Russia’s main ally in the region in buttressing Mr. Assad, also condemned the American attack as “dangerous, destructive and a violation of international law.” Bahram Ghasemi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement that his government condemned the missile strikes, adding that they would lead to “the strengthening of failing terrorists” and complicate the situation in the region.

The British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, expressed support for the American strikes. “One of the purposes of this very limited and appropriate action was to deter the regime from using gas in this appalling way,” he told the BBC.

In a joint statement, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President François Hollande of France said that Mr. Assad, the Syrian president, “bears sole responsibility.”

A spokesman for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Ibrahim Kalin, said the American strikes had been a positive response to “war crimes” in Syria, where the six-year civil war has led to nearly 400,000 deaths and created a refugee crisis as millions sought to flee. Mr. Kalin also repeated Turkey’s call to immediately set up and enforce a no-fly zone to create safe areas in Syria for those fleeing the violence.

The American strikes were also praised by Israel and by Saudi Arabia, two crucial allies of the United States in the Middle East. In a statement carried by the state news agency SPA, a Saudi official called the strikes a “courageous decision” by Mr. Trump. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said he hoped the action would “resonate not only in Damascus, but in Tehran, Pyongyang and elsewhere.” 
Mr. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, gave no clear indication of how Russia might respond, and analysts suggested that the Kremlin had few options.

Russia could treat the strikes as a one-time event, limiting its response to criticizing the American aggression and conceding a revitalized American influence in the region. American officials have indicated that no other strikes were planned for the immediate future.

Russia could also try to confront the Americans more directly, but that would have unpredictable consequences. “There will be many screams on the Russian television with people condemning the strikes, but everybody understands that this is just a symbolic act meant for Trump to look different from Obama,” Vladimir Frolov, a foreign affairs analyst, said in an interview. “There won’t be any tangible reaction; this was a one-off strike.”

Others suggested that the lack of a Russian military reaction in Syria pointed to a realistic approach.

“Its initial response was to huff and puff and call it unprovoked aggression, of course; it could do nothing less,” Mark Galeotti, an expert on the Russian military, wrote in an online commentary. He noted that Russia’s state-of-the-art air defense system, which had been deployed to Syria with great fanfare, was apparently not used against the American attack.

“Moscow might not like Washington’s response, but nor was it willing to stand in the way of it,” he said. “That is a heartening sign of realism.”

Moscow might wait to formulate a response until Tuesday, when Mr. Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil and an old friend of the Kremlin, is set to make his first visit to Russia as secretary of state.

Mr. Peskov said that the American attack would do nothing to advance the fight against international terrorism, which he called a priority for Mr. Putin and which he noted had also been a main pledge of the Trump campaign.

“Most important, from Putin’s point of view, this move doesn’t bring us closer to the end goal in a fight against international terrorism,” Mr. Peskov said. “On the contrary, this creates a serious obstacle for the building of an international coalition to fight it and to effectively resist this universal evil.”

Mr. Putin dispatched the Russian Army to Syria, which has long been Russia’s main ally in the Middle East, in September 2015 with the stated goal of fighting terrorism, although the main purpose of the deployment was to shore up Mr. Assad, whose rule was faltering.

Other officials were quick to compare the cruise missile attack to other American interventions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, that had ended poorly.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, compared the attack to the American invasion of Iraq. “This is reminiscent of the 2003 situation, when the United States and the United Kingdom, along with their allies, invaded Iraq without the U.N. Security Council’s consent,” Mr. Lavrov said at a news conference on Friday after a meeting in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, between foreign ministers of former Soviet states.

The question of whether the United States invaded Iraq without the approval of the Security Council has long been a matter of debate. Washington has asserted that previous resolutions gave it the authority to take action, but critics have argued that it needed explicit United Nations approval.

Russia has repeatedly defended Syria against the accusation that Damascus has used chemical weapons. In this case, Moscow said the strike on Tuesday had actually hit a chemical weapons warehouse controlled by insurgents, a version of events that has been widely dismissed by the West.

General Konashenkov also repeated the Russian assertion that all chemical weapons had been removed from Syrian government stockpiles, and he called on the United States to present evidence that Damascus had used them.

Mr. Peskov asserted that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had declared Syria to be free of chemical weapons, although it did not quite do that.

In an initial statement after the attack on Tuesday, the organization said it was seriously concerned about the allegations and wanted to gather more information before coming to a judgment.

“The O.P.C.W. strongly condemns the use of chemical weapons by anyone, anywhere and under any circumstances,” the group said.

Mr. Peskov said that the United States had launched its attack to distract attention from the high number of civilian casualties caused by a recent American airstrike in Mosul, Iraq. 

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April 07, 2017 , ,
President Trump spoke after the United States carried out a missile attack in Syria on Thursday in response to the Syrian government's deadly chemical weapons attack.


WASHINGTON — President Trump said Thursday night that the United States had carried out a missile strike in Syria in response to the Syrian government’s chemical weapons attack this week, which killed more than 80 civilians.

“Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the air base in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched,” Mr. Trump said in remarks at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

Mr. Trump — who was accompanied by senior advisers, including Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist; Reince Priebus, his chief of staff; his daughter Ivanka Trump; and others — said his decision had been prompted in part by what he called the failures by the world community to respond effectively to the Syrian civil war.

“Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behavior have all failed, and failed very dramatically,” the president said, referring to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. “As a result, the refugee crisis continues to deepen, and the region continues to destabilize, threatening the United States and its allies.”
The Pentagon announced that 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles had been fired at Al Shayrat airfield in Syria. The missiles were aimed at Syrian fighter jets, hardened aircraft shelters, radar equipment, ammunition bunkers, sites for storing fuel and air defense systems.
Hassan Youssef, 40, a victim of Tuesday’s chemical weapons attack in northern Syria, was in a hospital Thursday in the city of Idlib. The United States launched a missile attack Thursday night in response to the Syrian government’s use of such weapons on civilians.

Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, told reporters Friday morning that the strike “deals a significant blow to relations between Russia and America, which are already in a poor state,” according to the news agency RIA.

Mr. Peskov said the strike did nothing to combat international terrorism. “On the contrary, this creates a serious obstacle for building of an international coalition to fight it and to effectively resist this universal evil,” he said. Fighting terrorism was Mr. Putin’s stated goal when he dispatched the Russian military to Syria in September 2015, though its main effect has been to shore up Mr. Assad.

Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Russian forces had been notified in advance of the strike. “Military planners took precautions to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the airfield,” he said. No Russian aircraft were at the base, military officials said.

“We are assessing the results of the strike,” Captain Davis added. “Initial indications are that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat airfield, reducing the Syrian government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons.”

The cruise missiles struck the airfield beginning around 8:40 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, and the strikes continued for three to four minutes. 

 
According to Captain Davis, the missiles were fired from the destroyers Porter and Ross in the eastern Mediterranean.

Talal Barazi, the governor of Homs Province, where the base sits, told Reuters early Friday that ambulances and fire trucks were scrambling to respond to fires there.

Administration officials described the strikes Mr. Trump ordered as a graphic message to the world that the president was no longer willing to stand idly by as Mr. Assad used horrific weapons in his country’s long civil war. To do otherwise, they said, would be to essentially bless the use of chemical weapons by Mr. Assad and others who might use them.

“This clearly indicates the president is willing to take decisive action when called for,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson told reporters in Florida. He said Mr. Trump had concluded after seeing the results of the chemical attack that the United States could no longer “turn away, turn a blind eye.”

“The more we fail to respond to the use of these weapons, the more we begin to normalize their use,” Mr. Tillerson said, a thinly veiled reference to President Barack Obama’s decision to refrain from strikes in 2013.

Mr. Tillerson added that the United States had not informed Mr. Putin about the coming missile strikes and that Mr. Trump had not spoken with the Russian leader in the hours afterward.

The decision to act came with a swiftness that took observers of the new president by surprise. After being briefed on the chemical attack shortly after it occurred, American intelligence agencies and their allies worked quickly to confirm the source of the chemical weapons, administration officials said.

In Washington the next day, the president convened a meeting of senior members of his National Security Council, where military aides presented him with three options. Officials said Mr. Trump peppered them with questions and directed them to focus on two of those options.

On Thursday, after Mr. Trump traveled to Florida for his dinner with President Xi Jinping of China, he convened what officials described as a “decision meeting” with his top national security aides — many of them with him at Mar-a-Lago, and others on secure video screens from Washington.

After what aides called a “meeting of considerable length,” Mr. Trump authorized the missile strikes before starting the dinner with Mr. Xi. 

“It was important during the president’s deliberations,” said H. R. McMaster, the president’s national security adviser, to weigh the risk of action against the “risk of this continued, egregious, inhumane attacks on innocent civilians with chemical weapons.”

A military official said the attack was at the more limited end of the military options presented to Mr. Trump on Thursday by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. The official said the strike was intended to send a signal to Mr. Assad about the United States’ intention to use military force if he continues to use chemical weapons.

It was the first time the White House had ordered military action against forces loyal to Mr. Assad.

Mr. McMaster said the missile strikes would not eliminate Mr. Assad’s ability to use chemical weapons, but would degrade it. He said the United States military had specifically sought to avoid hitting what it believes is a facility containing more sarin gas at the airfield.

He said the military had also sought to “minimize risk” to citizens of other countries — specifically Russians — who might have been in the area at the time.

The Pentagon on Thursday night released a graphic showing the flight track of Syrian aircraft as they left the Shayrat field on Tuesday and carried out the chemical attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province. 

The speed with which the Trump administration responded — and remarks earlier in the day by American officials who said that options were still being considered — appeared intended to maximize the element of surprise, and contrasted sharply with the Obama administration’s methodical scrutiny of a military response.

It was Mr. Trump’s most important order so far for the use of force — virtually all of his administration’s other operations in Syria, Yemen and Iraq have been carried out under authorization delegated to his commanders — and appeared intended to send a message to North Korea, Iran and other potential adversaries that the new commander in chief was prepared to act, sometimes on short notice.

Two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, praised the strike in a statement and called for Mr. Trump to go further: to “take Assad’s air force — which is responsible not just for the latest chemical weapons attack, but countless atrocities against the Syrian people — completely out of the fight.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also expressed support.

Mr. Tillerson is scheduled to arrive in Moscow on Tuesday. Administration officials said the strike was intended to put Mr. Tillerson in a position to tell the Russians that they should use their leverage to ensure that Mr. Assad’s government does not carry out more chemical weapon strikes and to facilitate a diplomatic resolution to the civil war in Syria.

The events of Thursday night marked a dramatic turnabout for Mr. Trump, who until this week had displayed virtually no interest in a deeper role for the United States in the long, bloody conflict. Well before he became a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump pleaded with Mr. Obama in 2013 to avoid the kind of strike that he has now ordered.

As recently as this week, before seeing images of dying children gasping for breath during the chemical attack, Mr. Trump and his top aides hardly appeared inclined to more forcefully assert American power in the country. But the change seemed to emerge during a Rose Garden news conference Wednesday afternoon, as Mr. Trump reacted to news, and images, of the attack with horror and a newfound desire to respond.

In less than 24 hours, his shift was reflected at the Pentagon, where senior Defense Department and military officials began drafting options for Mr. Trump, and in Florida, where Mr. Tillerson hinted at a strong response to Mr. Assad’s actions.

In remarks late Thursday evening to a small group of reporters, recorded and quickly broadcast to the world, Mr. Trump announced his decision.

“We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world,” Mr. Trump said solemnly. “We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who passed. And we hope as long as America stands for justice, then peace and harmony will in the end prevail.” 
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April 06, 2017 ,
On Nov. 10, Beth Sutinis sat at her desk in Brooklyn with a big task looming. As the executive editor for the children’s division of Time Inc. Books, she and her colleagues had worked through the fall to update their book “Presidents of the United States.” They added a spread about Barack Obama, another about the 2016 election and a third about Hillary Clinton, who polls had indicated would be elected the 45th president.

In the days after the election, Ms. Sutinis scrambled to produce a profile of the person who was elected instead. “It was one of the harder things I have had to do in a long career of writing and editing nonfiction for kids,” she said.
Presidential biographies are a staple of children’s book publishing, and of classrooms across the country. Nonfiction for children is a surging category, particularly in light of a Common Core mandate that schools put greater emphasis on it in their curriculum. Publishers like Penguin Young Readers, Scholastic and Time for Kids chronicle stories like the rise of Mr. Obama from Illinois state senator to president, or the political legacy of the Bush family, interspersing those accounts with facts about presidential history. The books hit bookshelves every four years, usually long before historians and writers of nonfiction for adults weigh in. 

But the story of Donald J. Trump posed a unique set of challenges.

After an election cycle whose divisive effect on voters is still being felt, publishing books for classroom use has been unusually perilous. For Ms. Sutinis, the difficulty went beyond the time crunch to finding concise quotations from Mr. Trump’s campaign appearances that didn’t include contentious remarks.
 

Ms. Sutinis’s updated edition outlines Mr. Trump’s business and television career and his campaign. “He made controversial remarks about several groups of people, including Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans and women,” the book reads. “This led many, including some Republican officials, to back away from him.”

It goes on: “But Trump continued to receive wide support and thousands of people attended his rallies.”

One page features a “Did You Know?” fact: “Donald Trump is the first person elected to the presidency without experience in either the government or the military.”

A number of publishers have already released books about Mr. Trump, including “Rookie Biographies: President Donald Trump,” from Scholastic, and “Donald Trump: Outspoken Personality and President,” from Lerner Publications. The president and his relatives will also be the subject of future books for young readers. Lerner, for instance, announced that it would publish “Ivanka Trump: A Brand of Her Own” this fall.

But publishers and editors of children’s books are unaccustomed to weighing issues of partisan division and biased reporting, said Daniel Kraus, the books for youth editor at Booklist magazine in Chicago. Now, adults of different political persuasions are debating the veracity of basic facts. “Publishers are a little nervous about that,” Mr. Kraus said. “Parents can say, ‘This is not the reality I believe.’ It’s a reflection of where we are as a nation right now.”

For a children’s audience, the mandate is to provide unbiased facts with a dusting of the context required to maintain accuracy, said Joanne Mattern, a freelance writer of children’s nonfiction with 250 titles on her résumé.

Ms. Mattern has written about Mr. Trump in two biographies for children and in an update of “The New Big Book of U.S. Presidents,” from Running Press Kids, which begins, “Donald Trump was the most unlikely of presidential candidates.”

Running Press gave Ms. Mattern discretion to include relevant topics about Mr. Trump’s influence. She included “The Apprentice,” and “Trump and the Muslim Community,” writing that he had called for a temporary “shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States.

“This is a big part of Trump’s policies and a big reason he was elected,” Ms. Mattern said. “You couldn’t leave it out.”

Publishers have also addressed the election’s backdrop. “A True Book: President Donald Trump,” released by Scholastic, tells of Mr. Trump’s real estate career, and of public perceptions of his Democratic opponent, Mrs. Clinton. “Clinton was a strong choice for president,” read one paragraph, which concluded, “However, many people did not like Clinton. They felt she was not trustworthy and would not bring enough changes to the government.”

In a prepublication draft of the book, a page titled “Troubling Statements” read, in part: “Some of Trump’s biggest supporters were white nationalists. Their comments and actions during and after the campaign were racist and often dangerous. Trump did little to speak against them.”


In the finished book, “Troubling Statements” had been changed to “Campaign Statements.” The section about discrimination was modified to read, “Some of Trump’s critics felt he did not speak out against prejudicial people and groups strongly enough.”

Joana Costa Knufinke, group editor for nonfiction books in Scholastic’s library publishing division, said, “We make an effort to show both points of view.”

Some publishers are holding off on Trump biographies altogether. “We feel it’s too soon,” said Jane O’Connor, the creator of the “Who Was?” series from Penguin Young Readers, a bookstore and book fair fixture offering biographies of historical figures ranging from Pablo Picasso to Steve Jobs. In 2017, a total of 17 “Who Was?”/”Who Is?” books will come out. None will be about Mr. Trump.

The series does not automatically report on every president, Ms. O’Connor said. For instance, there is no “Who Is George W. Bush?” or “Who Is Bill Clinton?”

Mr. Obama was given “Who Is” coverage soon after he was elected, and Ms. O’Connor, under the pseudonym Roberta Edwards, wrote the biography herself. Mr. Obama’s election was historic, she said, because he was the nation’s first African-American president.

The 2016 election was also historic, Ms. O’Connor added, but “I don’t think Trump’s life beforehand is all that interesting. To have a book that is just about him winning the presidency, we think it’s not warranted.”

The conservative publishing company Regnery — it has published children’s books by Callista Gingrich, the wife of Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and by Janice Dean, senior meteorologist for Fox News — said it had no immediate plans to publish a biography of Mr. Trump for its young readers.

Some writers say they are also struggling to write about the Trump family. Kathleen Krull worked to get her new book, “A Kids’ Guide to America’s First Ladies,” ready for publication with up-to-date reporting on the spouse of the 2016 election winner, Ms. Krull said. “But the information on Melania Trump was scarce.”

In a chapter titled “Glamour to Spare,” Ms. Krull wrote that Mrs. Trump “is not your traditional first lady. As well as being the wealthiest, she is the only one who is the president’s third wife,” adding that she was also “the first to have been a supermodel.”

“There is not a lot substantial to say about her,” Ms. Krull said. “I did try to be fair.”

In her new book, “Donald Trump: Outspoken Personality and President,” the author Jill Sherman packed in details about Mr. Trump’s family. But Ms. Sherman, who has written children’s books about the Komodo dragon and the Irish potato famine, said biographical details about Mr. Trump were being denied and debated by some of his supporters. “Everything has its unique challenges, but I would say the Donald Trump biography was overwhelming,” she said.

Among the unusual considerations were how much to include scandals, including those related to Mr. Trump’s three marriages. “Ordinarily with a book like this, I wouldn’t put much of a focus on relationships and marriages, but I thought it was important,” she said. “It was from the marriage to Ivana, and their divorce, that he became a celebrity.”

The entire country is focused on Mr. Trump right now, but he is not the only president with a complicated past, said Ms. Sutinis of Time Inc. When she was reviewing all the entries of “Presidents of the United States,” she noted that the previous edition reported that Thomas Jefferson had grown up in a wealthy family on a plantation. For the new edition, she inserted a paragraph about Mr. Jefferson, the slave owner.

The earlier edition had been published in 2006. “Even in the last 10 years, we have become more honest in how we deal with difficult history,” she said, adding that children today are also far more sophisticated and aware of the news.

Not only do they have access to news online, she said, but they also “have access to us, their parents, and they are with us when we are reading news articles on our phones. We are all consuming news during family time, and we are discussing news in those family settings. They are more exposed to news, and they’re asking more questions.” 

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