In what ought to win the understatement of the week award, Steve Benen at the Rachel Maddow Blog writes about the situation in Syria Tuesday: “The crisis, in other words, is intensifying in ways the American president may not fully appreciate or understand.”
Benen reminds us that just two months ago, after launching a cruise missile attack on a Syrian air base, Donald Trump tried to reassure Americans with a vow of “we’re not going into Syria”—even though U.S. special forces have been in Syria for some time.
Trump’s statement seemed to mesh with his previous statements that “We should stay the hell out of Syria,” and “I would not go into Syria, but if I did it would be by surprise and not blurted all over the media like fools.” Just nine months ago, Trump said Hillary Clinton’s proposed Syria policies would “lead to World War III.”
Since Trump took the oath of office, however, the U.S. has waded ever more deeply into the Syrian quagmire that has seen more than 400,000 people killed and 5 million fleeing into exile.
Over the weekend, the U.S. shot down a Syrian Su-22, one of the three decades-old, Russian-made fighter jets in the arsenal of President Bashar al-Assad. And the Russians, longtime supporters of the Assad regime (as well al-Assad’s father when he ran Syria), responded:
On Monday, Russia condemned that strike as a “flagrant violation of international law” and said its forces will treat U.S.-led coalition aircraft and drones as targets if they are operating in Syrian airspace west of the Euphrates River while Russian aviation is on combat missions.
Now ought to be the time when Trump phones up the Kremlin and says “Vladimir Vladimirovich, my old friend, how can we avoid further clashes in Syria?” But then, the fellow squatting in the Oval Office since January seems not to have the first notion of how foreign policy works and takes his job as commander in Tweet a lot more seriously than his job as commander in chief.
The reckless, ego-driven impulsiveness of this guy who reportedly hates being president has the potential to make what’s happening in Syria even more of a tinderbox. Deadly as the war has been already, having the two nations with the planet’s largest nuclear arsenals shooting at each other in the skies over Syria could obviously make the toll so far seem puny.