WASHINGTON—On the use of military force, there were two distinct campaign Donald Trumps.

There was, first and foremost, the “America first” non-interventionist.

That version of Trump decried war spending in the Middle East as a hopeless waste of money better spent rebuilding U.S. infrastructure. That version of Trump would tolerate dictators like Syria’s Bashar Assad as long as they fought terrorists.

But there was also Trump the bellicose militarist.

That version complained that the U.S. had grown soft and weak, its squishy leaders now mocked by foreign powers, its armed forces decrepit. That Trump would tolerate not even little snubs from adversaries, would lavish money upon the troops, would “bomb the hell” out of terrorists.

The two Trumps were irreconcilable. It was not at all clear what would happen when he faced a real test in the Oval Office.

Well, the test just happened: Trump the militarist won, and what happened to the other guy is a mystery.

With his Thursday order to launch airstrikes against the Assad regime, the president has abandoned much of his previous rhetoric without a coherent explanation as to why. After four years explicitly demanding inaction on Syria, even after other chemical attacks by Assad, he has now declared the deterrence of such attacks “in the vital national security interest of the United States.”

And after two years casually waving aside pleas to protect Syrian children by accepting them as refugees, he has now cited the protection of those same children to justify an attack.

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The strike was squarely in line with one firm Trump promise: speed and surprise in matters of war. It heralds the end of the painstaking use-of-force deliberations of the Obama era — and the dawn of an era, it appears, where the American public gets almost no warning even about bombings that are not in response to direct threats.

As rapid military interventions go, the strike was conventional: a limited response to the banned use of a horrific weapon. It was strongly endorsed by American allies, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and by Democratic leaders in Washington. Obama’s inaction in response to Assad brutality dismayed even some senior members of his foreign policy team, and many Democrats have pushed for a more forceful response; Hillary Clinton herself called for airstrikes at an event earlier on Thursday.

Yet Trump’s decision, and the speed with which he ditched his oft-repeated warnings against attacking Syria, has left a host of big questions unanswered.

Trump told Americans over and over that he would not explain his military plans in advance, lest the enemy gain an advantage. Smart or not, his silence has left his goals unknown to the public.

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The assurances of anonymous officials aside, it is not at all evident what the president himself is seeking to accomplish — or whether he has thought about an endgame. Rex Tillerson, his marginalized secretary of state, said Thursday night: “You should not in any way extrapolate that (the strikes) changed our policy or posture on Syria in any way.” The world, though, does not know what that policy or posture is any longer.

For the time being, the U.S. is involved in what amounts to two different wars in a fiendishly complex hot zone. Trump had already deployed more than 400 troops to Syria in preparation for a future assault on Raqqa, Daesh’s self-proclaimed capital. Now he is challenging the Syrian dictator his administration said last week it was not interested in ousting.

For the moment, the strike appears to be intended to send a specific message to Assad to stop using chemical weapons — it “laid down a marker,” a senior administration official told CNN — rather than signal the beginning of a genuine attempt at regime change. Trump, who had forcefully urged Barack Obama not to enforce his chemical weapons “red line,” now appears to be enforcing it himself.

But any defiance by Assad may well compel Trump into the kind of escalation supposedly “limited” Middle East interventions frequently spiral into. In other words: America may be one or two Assad moves from a broader Syria conflict led by an impulsive, erratic and unpopular president who has shown no penchant for long-term strategic thinking.

“Trump biggest worry now: what if Assad defies him and uses chemical weapons again?” Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, wrote on Twitter.

Even if Assad does not, Trump is on a crash course with the very Russian administration that allegedly used nefarious hacking to help him into power. Vladimir Putin is Assad’s key patron. Trump’s move escalates tensions with another nuclear power conducting its own airstrikes in Syria in support of the regime — and that has the capacity to shoot down U.S. planes there.

Trump faced immediate criticism from Democrats and from the more libertarian-leaning members of the Republican caucus for declining to ask Congress for authorization to conduct the strikes.

Any further intervention risks severely alienating a significant portion of his own supporters, many of whom believed him when he said he would avoid the kinds of wars Clinton supported. Two of his most famous backers on the online far right, including one Trump’s son was promoting on Twitter earlier in the week, expressed immediate fury on Thursday.

“I guess Trump wasn’t ‘Putin’s puppet’ after all, he was just another deep state/Neo-Con puppet,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson, a prominent editor at the conspiracy website InfoWars. “I’m officially OFF the Trump train.”

All of a sudden, the outcome in Syria may say a lot about whether the train gets derailed entirely.

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