All it took was 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to blow Donald Trump’s Russia scandal out of the news. Even as the The Washington Post confirmed that the F.B.I. obtained a secret warrant last summer to surveil then–Trump adviser Carter Page, who has acknowledged communicating with Russian spies, the media was racing to cover every angle of the latest 180-degree turn by the White House—this time on its policy toward Russia itself.

After months of endless, sometimes inexplicable praise for the Russian government, Trump effectively declared President Vladimir Putin persona non grata this week, leaving the international community spinning and administration officials struggling to translate an inchoate new Middle East strategy into a coherent foreign policy. The outward change in orientation was swift: days after seeing a video of an alleged poison gas attack in Syria, the president carried out dozens of retaliatory missile strikes Thursday night against an air base that was jointly used by the Bashar al-Assad regime and Russia, one of its closest allies. U.S. officials quietly accused the Kremlin of covering up the use of chemical weapons, which were alleged stored at the airfield. By Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley were both suggesting that Assad, and Russia, were on notice. “It’s no question that Russia is isolated. They have aligned themselves with North Korea, Syria, Iran, and that is not exactly a group of countries you are looking to hang out with,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday. The following morning, in an interview that aired on Fox Business, Trump himself derided Putin for “backing a person that’s truly an evil person.” The alliance, he continued, is “very bad for Russia . . . very bad for mankind . . . very bad for the world.”

The reversal on Russia blindsided both Washington and Moscow. “The change in rhetoric on Russia is head-spinning. I’m glad to see it and I hope it continues, but so far the only thing we know about this administration’s foreign policy is that it will probably change in a week or two,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy told The New York Times, criticizing the “broader incoherence of this administration’s foreign policy.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was meeting Tillerson in Moscow, reportedly questioned the White House’s suddenly “contradictory” and “very ambiguous” foreign policy. Even Putin acknowledged that his gamble on Trump had taken an unexpected turn. “One could say that the level of trust on a working level, especially on the military level, has not improved, but rather has deteriorated,” he said during an interview Wednesday.

The Trump administration, too, has been struggling to explain the president’s new foreign policy vision. Spicer, Haley, and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster have all given conflicting remarks over the past several days on whether the missile strike augurs a regime change in Syria. At a press conference on Tuesday, Defense Secretary James Mattis asserted that defeating the Islamic State remains America’s top priority. On Fox Business, Trump clarified that he is not “going into Syria,” though about 1,000 troops are already there. Tillerson briefly botched the new anti-Moscow playbook while meeting with foreign ministers in Italy when he asked, “Why should U.S. taxpayers be interested in Ukraine?,” alarming the gathered diplomats and adding another twist back into the never-ending Russian melodrama.