National security adviser John Bolton was supposed to lead a White House meeting of the president’s national security team on Monday afternoon, but a surprise visitor showed up and took the reins instead: Mike Pence.

The vice president doesn’t often attend the White House’s Principals Committee meetings, which are typically led by the national security adviser, but Pence guided Monday’s discussion as President Donald Trump’s senior aides debated how to respond to a gruesome chemical weapons attack in Syria, according to four senior administration officials.


Pence’s attendance wasn’t listed on his public schedule. Although some meeting attendees viewed his appearance as an attempt to upstage Bolton on his first day as national security adviser, others saw it as an effort by the vice president to offer a steadying hand as Trump confronts a thorny national security dilemma with a foreign policy team in flux and amid the distraction of multiple investigations.

A White House official said the vice president attended the meeting in the president’s place, though the president’s attendance would have turned the gathering into a meeting of his National Security Council — a formal distinction previous administrations have closely adhered to. The same official said Pence has chaired Principals Committee meetings before.

Trump, who has promised that Syrian President Bashar Assad will pay a “big price” for the latest attack, is balancing his public threats to punish Assad with the possibility that airstrikes against Syria could kill Russian soldiers there and create a dangerous crisis with Moscow.

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Trump’s national security team is rehashing a debate based on the parameters set forth by the president a year ago when he ordered airstrikes after a chemical weapons attack last April, and administration officials said the president feels strongly that the use of chemicals weapons is a type of barbarism the U.S. cannot tolerate. But foreign policy analysts say the administration has yet to find a way to fundamentally shift the dynamics.

“When he ordered that strike, he in essence bought on to the Obama red line,” said Eric Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the George W. Bush administration, referring to the previous administration’s threat — empty, as it turned out — that the use of chemical weapons would spur the U.S. to action. “So now he’s bought on to that red line, he’s gotta enforce it,” Edelman said of Trump.

The president is facing the crisis surrounded by some new faces, like Bolton — and without many old ones, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton, who announced his resignation on Sunday.

The White House said Tuesday that homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert, who has been with the president from the beginning, plans to leave the White House in the coming weeks. And Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo, a trusted Trump adviser, is preparing for his confirmation hearings on Thursday.

The president was briefed on the options put forward by his advisers in Monday's principal's committee meeting, according to a senior administration official. The president has also consulted with French President Emmanuel Macron and, on Tuesday, with British Prime Minister Theresa May.

On Tuesday morning, the White House abruptly announced that Trump would no longer be taking a planned trip to South America this weekend, opting instead to stay in Washington to oversee the Syria situation. Pence will travel to Lima, Peru, instead.

The Syria crisis coincides with the escalation of myriad investigations surrounding Trump’s closest associates, diverting Trump’s attention and sapping his emotion. The FBI raided the office and hotel room of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on Monday, setting off fears inside the White House that the president may move to fire senior Justice Department officials or special counsel Robert Mueller.

The president addressed the raids on Monday night before a meeting with senior military leaders, calling them “an attack on our country.”

“It’s an attack on what we all stand for,” he said. “And here we are talking about Syria and we’re talking about a lot of serious things.”

Trump's critics say his threats may force the U.S. to ill-considered action.

“Trump has boxed himself in. Having chosen a limited strike last year in an attempt to establish deterrence against chemical weapons use, he faces pressure to engage in a larger strike now that deterrence has failed,” said Colin Kahl, who served as national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has pushed the president and other White House aides — sometimes, to the point of frustration and anger — to look past what military officials call the “spray and pray” option to consider what the U.S. is trying to achieve in Syria and whether it has a plan to achieve those aims. A Pentagon spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

James Jeffrey, who worked closely with Mattis as ambassador to Iraq during Mattis’ tenure as head of Central Command, suggested two reasons why the defense secretary might be reluctant to go ahead with strikes.

“Mattis will not want a strike if it doesn’t combine with an overall strategy toward Syria, which this administration does not have,” Jeffrey said.

Edelman, the former Bush administration official, said that last year's Syria strike “wasn’t embedded into an overall strategy on Syria,” which is problematic because it hasn’t deterred Assad from using chemical weapons. “So now the question is how do you establish deterrence? It has to be more painful than the last strike.”

Jeffrey said Mattis may also be trying to reserve military resources and attention for a potential conflict with North Korea — one that aggressive action in Syria might give the North Koreans an opening to precipitate. “As long as a North Korean ICBM capability is on the table, Mattis will not want to be diverted in the Middle East into something that could escalate into a broader regional conflict with Iran,” Jeffrey said.

Others, including some of the president’s informal advisers, are pushing for a much more forceful military response than the limited strike on a Syrian airfield last year aimed at deterring further use of poison gas.

“That has failed,” said retired Army Gen. Jack Keane. “Deterrence is no longer feasible. You have to stop the use of chemical weapons. The only way to make that happen is to destroy the delivery systems or the chemicals themselves — or both.”

That includes the aircraft and helicopters the Syrian army has used to launch the chemical attacks, he said.

“I think [Assad] has about six operational airfields,” Keane added. “It is not as big as it sounds.”

But he acknowledged the presence of Russian technicians at those airfields and is calling on the Trump administration, “if they haven’t already, to tell the Russians all those bases are vulnerable to be struck” and that Moscow should remove its personnel.

He does not believe that Russia wants a bigger fight with United States. Yet there would be other risks to a more aggressive U.S. military response because it would likely require American warplanes — not just cruise missiles fired from ships at sea like last time. “We would have to penetrate Syrian air defenses to do it.”

But Keane said he believes there is a strong reluctance among the Pentagon leadership, including Mattis, to take such aggressive action, for fearing of the conflict spinning out of control.

“They have a minimalist view,” he told POLITICO. “We have to have the spine to stand up for civilization and against the use of chemical weapons to kill men, women and children. We have the means to stop it, and stop it we should.”

Matthew Nussbaum and Michael Crowley contributed to this report.

