President Trump has sometimes seemed to view military action as a game and foreign policy as something set by online taunts. He seemed to think that as commander in chief he could simply follow his whims.

So it was reassuring that his military response to a suspected chemical attack that killed dozens of people in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7 was coordinated with Britain and France. In his address to the nation Friday night, he said that preventing the use of chemical weapons was in the “vital national security interest of the United States.”

Earlier this week we got his usual bluster. “Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart,’” the president said on Twitter on Wednesday, in his best movie tough-guy impersonation, after a Russian diplomat warned that his nation’s forces would shoot down any missile fired at their ally Syria. On Friday night his message to the Syrian regime’s two main defenders, Russia and Iran, was more measured. “What kind of a nation wants to be associated with the mass murder of innocent men, women and children?” he asked. “The nations of the world can be judged by the friends they keep.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that while this was a “one-off” attack, like the airstrike against Syria a year ago, the targets were involved in the production and storage of chemical agents, not just an airfield. He warned of further attacks if Syria used chemical weapons again.