‘A military assault on the Syrian dictator became an irresistible political narrative’

US President Donald Trump addresses the American public to elaborate on yesterday’s missile strike against a Syrian airbase.

Donald Trump has sent a message, not just to Syrian dictator ­Bashar al-Assad but to the US’s enemies and friends around the world. He repudiates the Obama legacy of strategic retreat; he is prepared to deploy US military power; and he believes in a return to assertive US leadership.

The symbolism is powerful. Trump is enforcing the red line against Syria that Obama enunciated but fatally decided not to ­enforce, with disastrous consequences for US power and prestige.

The idea of Trump repudiating Obama has far-reaching strategic consequences.

It exposes Obama’s folly and false morality on Syria. It is brilliant optics for Trump with his domestic backers in Middle America. It casts Trump in the role he craves, as a man of action showing the US can still be great in the world.

In no way does it solve the Syrian quagmire. Nor should it be seen as a pointer to how Trump might handle North Korea. It does, however, cast serious doubt on the long-speculated Trump-Putin concord in Syria and elsewhere. It reveals Trump as an astute opportunist ready to take unilateral ­action, to rethink and throw away past positions when they no longer suit.

A military assault on the Syrian dictator for gassing his citizens became an irresistible political narrative. It is fatuous to think Trump did not grasp this, and reaction around the world vindicates his judgment. Witness the strong ­bipartisan backing in this country from Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten.

Trump’s military intervention was swift, proportionate, precise and limited. It has won the support of many people hostile to Trump’s politics and policies. The immediate US goal is to deny Assad any further resort to chemical weapons. Trump’s appeal on this basis was powerful and emotional. It invokes a US moralistic leadership role against a dictator who broke legal and humanitarian codes.

In this quest it will attract a degree of global backing as well as popular support in the US. Yet there will be strategic consequences: Assad will be weakened and fresh doubts will be raised about his capacity to survive in any negotiated settlement. Before the strike, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson raised the possibility of the US and other nations working to remove the Syrian dictator from any final outcome.

While Trump’s action is limited, his rhetoric is sweeping. It is an appeal to all “civilised ­nations” to join the US “in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria and also to end terrorism of all kinds and all types”, an impossible objective.

The spirit and language of Trump’s address is also revealing. Having been frustrated in his legislative and executive moves at home — witness the failure on Obamacare — Trump seems liberated as a foreign policy president, turning to the Pentagon as Commander-in-Chief and asserting US military power in the world. It is the latest step in his personal discovery about how to be president.

The strike against Assad is the first time the US has taken direct military action against his regime in the six-year-old Syrian war. It runs in parallel with Trump’s determination as a new president to intensify the military campaign against Islamic State, thereby highlighting the competing goals in the Syrian conflict.

Trump risks retaliation in some form or another from Assad’s backers, Russia and Iran, or their proxies, given their fierce efforts to obliterate the resistance to the dictator. US officials report the Russians were given warning of the strike. But Russia’s reaction, ­accusing the US of breaking international law and warning that Trump has inflicted “major damage on US-Russia ties”, suggests that a rougher time is coming for Moscow-Washington relations.

The military intervention reveals yet again Trump’s unpredictability, the vast strategic transition he is undergoing as President and his capacity to change position dramatically.

The extent of Trump’s reversal on Syria is stunning. For a long time, he made it clear he wanted to co-operate with Russia in the campaign against Islamic State, a stance that delighted Assad, Russia and Iran. Indeed, Trump previously urged president Obama not to intervene in Syria because there was “no upside and tremendous downside”.

The sad truth is that Assad’s brutality in launching this chemical attack at Khan Sheikhoun, which killed at least 86 people, reflects a complacent arrogance that surely cannot be divorced from every signal Trump has given in the past about Syria. He could only have given Assad a false confidence.

Trump’s moralistic fervour about the slaughter was understandable but also a new side to him. He condemned Assad’s chemical weapon attack on his own people with a nerve agent that “choked out the lives of helpless men, women and children”. “Even beautiful babies” were “cruelly murdered”. The reports from the US suggest Trump was genuinely moved.

Trump had said the attack “had a big impact on me — big impact”. This was the signal: Trump had been emotionally touched. This man, who shifts dangerously between moods of anger and empathy, seemed to rethink the Syrian war very quickly. In the process, senior administration figures sent conflicting messages about Assad’s future.

The question remains: how much does Trump’s military action reflect deep strategic thinking as opposed to seizing an opportunity presented him where morality, popularity and decisiveness happened to coincide?

Leaders around the world, not least China’s President Xi Jinping, in the US for his summit meeting with Trump, will now feed this response into their efforts to comprehend this new US President in transition. His personality is coming to grips with the real power of the presidency.

Trump’s action was a unilateral US strike. Allies such as Australia were notified. Their agreement was not necessary. US Defence Secretary James Mattis informed Defence Minister Marise Payne yesterday morning of the Trump administration’s intention.

“The highly targeted strike was intended to prevent and deter a recurrence of this event,” Payne says. No Australian assets were involved. Australia’s Air Task Group is confined to eastern Syria, where it conducts operations against Islamic State.

Turnbull says the government “strongly supports the swift and just response of the United States” and calls its actions “calibrated and proportionate”. He says the UN Security Council “is once again at an impasse due to the position of the Assad regime supporter, Russia”, another implicit justification for the US action.

Turnbull brands the use of chemical weapons as “illegal and abhorrent”. Australia remains “fully committed” to military operations in Iraq and Syria but the US has not asked Australia for more military support. Turnbull says the US is not attempting to “overthrow” the Assad regime.

He casts doubt on whether Assad will become part of any negotiated solution, saying events of the past few days raise “very real questions” about this, giving a distinctly different emphasis from that of Foreign Minister Julie Bishop who earlier this week said Assad “must be part of the solution”.

Turnbull says the Russian government now has a “real responsibility” to ensure its client, the Assad regime, abandons its use of chemical weapons. He endorses Trump’s call for nations to come together and “bring this war to an end”.

Shorten’s support is conspicuous. Labor will judge future Trump decisions on merit but its statement yesterday, that the US military action was “appropriate and proportionate”, is unequivocal

The joint statement from Shorten, opposition foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong and opposition defence spokesman Richard Marles, says: “We support the US sending a strong signal that these gas attacks should never have occurred and they should never occur again. It was an atrocity, a war crime against civilians.”

By limiting his military assault to the Syrian air base, targeting aircraft, petroleum and logistical storage, ammunition and radars, Trump has given a precise meaning to his intervention. It does not necessarily point to any wider US military escalation. Such action raises the risk of retaliation against US forces now in Syria.

The sense of Republican ebullience, however, at Trump’s lurch to military intervention is unmistakable. “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump confronted a pivotal moment in Syria, and took decisive action,” two of his sharpest critics, John McCain, former Republican presidential candidate, and Lindsey Graham say in a joint statement.

They say the operation “sends an important message the United States will no longer stand idly by as Assad, aided and abetted by Putin’s Russia, slaughters innocent Syrians with chemical weapons and barrel bombs”.

Given Trump’s character, it is impossible to believe his attitude towards Assad has not changed fundamentally. “Years of previous attempts at changing Assad’s behaviour have all failed and failed very dramatically,” Trump says in his statement justifying the action.

Trump is right in deciding that action is superior to inaction. But having corrected Obama’s mistake, he must now display the political and military skills to get an outcome in Syria that points to improvement, a hard task.