Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS." This article is adapted from his Take on Sunday's show. The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author.

(CNN) In April 2017, President Donald Trump ordered a missile strike against Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria for its use of chemical weapons. I supported the action then because I thought it was worth punishing a regime for using these dreadful weapons.

I was heartened to see that President Trump, who had campaigned on the narrowest possible conception of America's interests in the world, was acknowledging some broader global values. And finally, I was reassured that Trump was willing to act forcefully against Vladimir Putin, with whom he had until then conducted a strange and starstruck flirtation.

Fareed Zakaria

For all these reasons, I support President Trump's use of American military power this week, especially since this time it was done in collaboration with Britain and France . We are living at a time when many global institutions and values that were built up over decades are eroding or under threat. To have some action taken to even symbolically enforce the norm against using chemical weapons is worthwhile.

But this does not change the reality, about which I spoke at the time, that the administration still does not have a Syria strategy. In fact, you can see the incoherence in its approach by the fact that days before deciding on a military intervention, Trump had announced that American troops were soon going to withdraw from Syria altogether

Trump's vacillation is simply a heightened version of the dilemma that the United States has faced from the start of the Syrian civil war. It has wanted to cheer on the forces of democracy. It has been dismayed by Assad's brutality. It has recognized the dangers of lawless areas in which Islamist radicals like ISIS can emerge. But it has never found a viable, moderate partner on the ground in Syria that was large or effective enough to have even a chance of becoming dominant militarily and politically.

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