Trump’s missile strikes seem to have been a one-off measure designed to deter Assad from using chemical weapons. His rhetoric on Thursday evening, which described the strike as intended “to prevent and deter the spread of chemical weapons,” suggests as much. The tomahawk missiles were explicit punishment for using gas on civilians, and there seem to be no further strikes planned, though it’s hard to know for sure.
If that’s the case, what matters most is the way Assad chooses to behave going forward. If he doesn’t make use of chemical weapons again, then perhaps we’ll see a return to the status quo and the dynamics of conflict in Syria could remain fairly similar to the way they have so far.
Or, maybe, they wouldn’t. Any analyst will tell you that Trump is simply impossible to predict.
“Say Assad did get the message and didn’t use chemical weapons again. Would they just go back to the way they were? Would Trump just go back and say, ‘Now we can go back to focusing on ISIS’? I mean, possibly. I wouldn’t rule that out as a possibility,” Thomas Wright, director of the Project on International Order and Strategy at the Brookings Institution, told Vox.
“Or will Trump be so outraged with Assad that he won’t want to work with him again? We just don’t know,” he added.
Part of that is because Trump’s decision to strike Assad clearly seems to have been based on
“What we’ve seen develop in the last week is a realization in Trump’s mind that his preconceptions about Syria were false, and that in fact the situation there is so bad and the people who he had considered to either be acceptable — i.e., Assad — or potentially worthy partners — i.e., Russia — are simply not what he thought they were,” Lister said.
