On Thursday, both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, let it be known that the United States no longer seeks Assad’s ouster:

The United States’ diplomatic policy on Syria for now is no longer focused on making the war-torn country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, leave power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said on Thursday, in a departure from the Obama administration’s initial and public stance on Assad’s fate. The view of the Trump administration is also at odds with European powers, who insist Assad must step down. The shift drew a strong rebuke from at least two Republican senators. . . . In Ankara on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Assad’s longer-term status “will be decided by the Syrian people.”

In a written statement, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) argued that the statements signaled a shift to “a Faustian bargain with Assad and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin sealed with an empty promise of counterterrorism cooperation.” He warned: “Such a policy would only exacerbate the terrorist threat to our nation. Not only would we make ourselves complicit in Assad and Putin’s butchery that has led to more than 400,000 Syrians killed and six million refugees, but we would empower ISIS, al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist terrorists as the only alternative to the dictator that the Syrian people have fought for six years to remove.” McCain concluded: “Trying to fight [the Islamic State] while pretending that we can ignore the Syrian civil war that was its genesis and fuels it to this day is a recipe for more war, more terror, more refugees, and more instability. I hope President Trump will make clear that America will not follow this self-destructive and self-defeating path.”

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Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) likewise denounced the apparent decision. “If the press reports are accurate and the Trump Administration is no longer focusing on removing Assad, I fear it will be the biggest mistake since President Obama failed to act after drawing a red line against Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” Graham said in a written statement. “To suggest that Assad is an acceptable leader for the Syrian people is to ignore the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people by the Assad regime. Leaving him in power is also a great reward for Russia and Iran.”

Outside foreign policy experts were puzzled.

Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy told me: “There remain at least two key unknowns: 1) Will the Trump Administration truly counter Iran’s regional ambitions in Syria, as it has promised to do (and which the Obama administration refused to do lest such a policy threaten the Iran nuclear deal)? 2) Will the Trump administration take the necessary steps post-victory in Raqqa to ensure that Sunni grievances are addressed in such a way that son-of-ISIS does not emerge from the ashes of ISIS?” He continued: ” If the answer to both questions is ‘yes,’ then the Administration will find itself taking measures that have the effect of driving Assad from power, even without declaring that as a goal, since Assad cannot long survive in a Syria in which Iran is on the defensive and Sunni grievances are addressed. If, however, the answer to either of these questions is ‘no,’ then Assad could be around for a long, long time.” In other words, rather than correcting the horrendous Obama policy, Republicans will have made it their own.