President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his “attitude” toward Syria and President Bashar al-Assad “has changed very much” in the wake of a deadly chemical weapons attack — but he would not say what action, if any, the United States might take in response.
He was referring to a chemical weapons attack in Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province of Syria, which weapons experts have attributed to the Syrian regime. Footage showed civilians, including many children, suffering from the effects of gas.
Trump on Thursday again refused to address what the U.S. might do in response to the deadly attack. On whether Assad should step down, the President said that "he's there, and I guess he's running things, so I guess something should happen." But, Trump added, "I don't want to say what I'm going to be doing with respect to Syria."
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, meanwhile, said Assad's "role in the future is uncertain, clearly." Tillerson told reporters that "with the acts he has taken it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people." According to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. military is drawing up options for a strike in response to the attack.
When asked if he and Trump would organize an international coalition to remove Assad, Tillerson replied that "those steps are underway."
"The process by which Assad would leave is something that I think requires an international community effort, both to first defeat ISIS within Syria, to stabilize the Syrian country to avoid further civil war, and then to work collectively with our partners around the world through a political process that would lead to Assad leaving," he said.
It marked a sharp turn from just one week ago, when Trump’s administration publicly signaled a shift in the United States’ position on Assad away from a focus on removing him from power. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told reporters the administration’s “priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out.” Tillerson, meanwhile, said at a news conference in Turkey that the “longer-term status of President Assad will be decided by the Syrian people.” Following on Haley and Tillerson’s statements, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said last week that “with respect to Assad, there is a political reality that we have to accept.”
“We need to focus on now defeating ISIS,” Spicer told reporters Friday. This week, Spicer said that “there is not a fundamental option of regime change as there has been in the past.”
“Somebody would be rather silly not acknowledging the political realities that exist in Syria,” Spicer said.
Then this week, Haley strongly rebuked Assad — and his backer, Russia — for the attack. “How many more children have to die before Russia cares?” she asked. If the Kremlin has the influence it claims in Syria, she said, “we need to see them use it.”
Haley also suggested the U.S. may consider unilateral action if the U.N. does not respond, saying that “when the United Nations consistently fails in its duty to act collectively, there are times in the life of states that we are compelled to take our own actions.”
Trump, however, did not discuss Russia but did blame the attack on Assad and linked it to former President Barack Obama. He said the Obama administration “had a great opportunity to solve this crisis a long time ago” and criticized his predecessor for his August 2012 “red line” warning on the use of chemical weapons and subsequent inaction. Before entering office, Trump had repeatedly said the U.S. should not attack Syria, even though the regime had crossed that red line.
Trump said the chemical attack “crossed a lot of lines for me” — “beyond a red line, many, many lines.”
"I've been watching it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility. And it's very, very possible, and I will tell you it's already happened, that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much,” Trump said on Wednesday.
He did not call for Assad to step down or elaborate on comments made by his administration that the U.S. is no longer focused on removing Assad. Experts told The Cipher Brief that a shift in U.S. position that would allow Assad to stay in power had merely made explicit a long-standing policy toward Syria.
“I don’t think it’s a big shift in policy,” Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Syria from 2011 to 2014, said. “The Obama administration had been pursuing a de facto policy of focusing fully on the Islamic State and not putting any pressure on Bashar al-Assad.”
“The Obama people didn’t want to speak publicly after what the President had said in August 2011” when Obama called for the Syrian leader to step down, Ford, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a lecturer at Yale, added.
Perry Cammack, who was part of Secretary of State John Kerry’s policy planning staff from 2013 to 2015 and previously worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for nearly a decade, said Trump’s focus on the previous administration in connection with this attack raises some key questions.
"The public blaming of the Obama administration to enforce the ‘red line’ does raise the question — what is the Trump administration going to do about it? And if your policy is that Assad’s status is ultimately up to the Syrian people, how do you square that circle?” Cammack, a fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, asked.
James Jeffrey, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey and The Cipher Brief expert, said the statements moving away from the focus on Assad leaving power suggests the Trump administration has either “given up” on containing Iran or bought into Russia’s line on Assad.
“By shifting incredibly to an even weaker policy towards Assad, and thus Iran, than Obama did, the Trump administration has either given up containing Iran, or bought the Russia disinformatzia that if U.S. ‘only recognizes’ Assad then he and the Russians can be split off from Iran’s anti-Sunni, anti-Saudi, anti-Turk, anti-Israel regional agenda. This was always hogwash and even Obama didn't let [then-Secretary of State John] Kerry be led by the nose,” Jeffrey said.
Tuesday’s chemical attack — which killed dozens of civilians, including children, after they were exposed to toxic gas — demonstrates yet again that Assad knows he can act with impunity, the experts noted. The Kremlin, meanwhile, released a statement acknowledging that Syrian planes had attacked Khan Sheikhoun, but tried to shift the blame, saying the deadly chemical attack resulted from hitting a rebel weapons arsenal. This claim has been widely dismissed, with evidence pointing to Syrian government forces.
“The optics of Assad gassing children can’t be one the Kremlin finds encouraging,” Cammack said. “But there’s a weird dynamic where the stronger Assad gets militarily, the less influence the Kremlin has to direct him. When he looked like he might be on the way out, Moscow had considerable influence, whereas now, Assad feels more empowered and Moscow’s ability to direct him has been reduced.”
With the chemical weapons attack attracting significant worldwide attention, Cammack said it will be important to watch Moscow’s response.
“When something like this happens, and there is international outrage, what does that do in terms of Moscow’s calculus? Do they support him militarily or tack more toward a political settlement? They can do both, of course, but this may change their calculus, the more they have to deal with these crises and humanitarian situations. If there is a big uproar, it could somewhat change the Kremlin’s calculations,” he said.
Assad “absolutely feels he can act with impunity,” Ford said.
“Friends of the U.S. understand that the Trump administration isn’t going to do anything to push Assad to negotiate a serious transition government,” he said, noting the U.S. has been largely absent from the U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva and only an observer at the Astana conference.
Ford said it is understood that U.S. under Trump — like under his predecessor — is “just not going to get involved and that it has a single-minded focus on the Islamic State and on using a big American military hammer without regard to the underlying political problem.”
According to the World Health Organization, some victims of the attack had symptoms consistent with exposure to nerve agents, noting “the likelihood of exposure to a chemical attack is amplified by an apparent lack of external injuries reported in cases showing a rapid onset of similar symptoms, including acute respiratory distress as the main cause of death.”
There have been numerous documented incidents of the Assad government using chemical weapons against the Syrian people. Tuesday’s incident is part of a long line of attacks targeting civilians that has occurred under the watch of Obama, and now Trump.
“The only thing that’s different is that it might have been a slightly larger scale, but I wouldn’t assume that that was carefully planned by the Syrian military, which operates frequently in a haphazard way. This is an ongoing problem — what happened is awful and terrible — but it’s not new,” Ford said.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
