Donald Trump was right to strike the Syrian regime. Now what?

Niall Ferguson says the US president made the correct call to respond to Assad’s chemical attack, showing up Obama’s failure in 2013, and hopes the bombing is part of a coherent strategy on the Middle East

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A Syrian woman carries a mattress at a temporary refugee camp in the village of Ain Issa, which houses people who fled Islamic State’s Syrian stronghold in Raqa. Syria lies in ruins. The total death toll lies somewhere between 320,000 and 470,000. More than 10 million people have been driven from their homes; half of them have fled abroad. Photo: AFP

Published: 2:15pm, 10 Apr 2017Updated: 5:56pm, 10 Apr 2017

When a president finds his approval rating in the doldrums and Congress slow to enact his domestic agenda, he naturally turns to foreign policy in search of quick wins. That, at any rate, is the cynical interpretation of US President Donald Trump’s decision to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airfield in Homs, in retaliation for Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in an attack that killed more than 80 civilians.

My view of Trump’s action is more positive. It is not that I think one salvo of missiles is going to end the civil war in Syria. Of course it won’t. But I think we can now discern the beginning of the improvement in US foreign policy we have been waiting for ever since president Barack Obama packed his bags, collected the biggest book advance in history and departed to the eight-bedroom schloss in Kalorama where he now resides.

Bear in mind that Obama’s worst mistake as president was his indecision about Syria. Back in 2011, as you may recall, he told Assad to “step aside”. He didn’t. In February 2012, Obama tried going through the UN Security Council, but Russia and China vetoed action on Syria. Under pressure from Republicans to arm the Free Syrian Army, Obama refused. Defence secretary Leon Panetta explained that arming the Free Syrian Army would lead to “a terrible civil war”. A terrible civil war happened anyway.

In the summer of 2012, Panetta, secretary of state Hillary Clinton, CIA director David Petraeus and chairman of the joint chiefs Martin Dempsey all pressed Obama to arm rebel groups. Obama reluctantly authorised CIA training of just 10,000 rebel fighters. These fighters prove useless.

This photo provided on April 4 by the Syrian anti-government activist group Edlib Media Centre, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian doctor treating a child following a suspected chemical attack, at a makeshift hospital, in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, northern Idlib province, Syria. Photo: Edlib Media Centre via AP

It was in the wake of these failures, in an attempt to sound tough, that the White House warned Assad that if he used chemical weapons he would “cross a red line”. Guess what: he used them anyway. In August 2013, Obama’s red line proved to be a pink dotted line when he announced that he would seek congressional approval for military action.