'Get ready, Russia'

The President's April 11 tweet virtually daring the Russians to stop an American punitive missile attack on Syria may be Donald Trump's most dangerous social-media utterance to date. It's an act of chest-beating defiance following a Russian vow to shoot down any such missiles or strike at their source, and it escalates tensions in the region shortly after Trump had declared his intent to disengage from Syria as soon as possible. Of course, he declared that intent before seeing footage of the aftermath of an apparent chemical weapons attack on an insurgent village. That kicked in an irrepressible American impulse -- one Trump supposedly had hoped to suppress -- to do something when tyrants commit atrocities against their own people. No matter how often he affects an "America first" position, he indulges as readily as any of his predecessors in acts of moral extravagance with no obvious material benefit to Americans. He may hope that Russia will back down from its bluster and rethink its support for the Assad regime, but now that they see how easily Syria can discombobulate American foreign policy, why would the Russians ever do that? They want their Mediterranean naval base and still think that only Assad can guarantee it, and they definitely don't give a damn what he does to rebels within his own borders. Since the recent Syrian trouble began, I've thought that the most likely way to get rid of Assad, if you really wanted to take a chance that way, was to have all the relevant powers assure Russia that any new regime would allow them to keep their base, since to my knowledge it's not American policy to drive Russia out of there. The real problem, however, isn't the naval base but Assad and Putin's friendly stance toward Iran, the power seen by both Israel and Saudi Arabia -- increasingly in the same Hitlerian terms -- as an existential threat. The President's real strategic goal should be getting Russia to cut ties with the Islamic Republic, but the hard fact is that Putin will never consider that without a major concession in return, most likely our acquiescence in Russia's domination of its "near abroad." In modern times Americans hate having to make such concessions -- "Yalta" is still a dirty word in some quarters -- but it seemed for a time that Donald Trump might see the world and our place in it differently. There's still a chance that he may, but just now, however novel and frightening his rhetoric seems, it looks like same old, same old.