Any reaction from Moscow will depend on whether Russia was complicit in Syria chemical attack, while Beijing may have to recalculate stance towards US

Donald Trump has made his point. The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday night that the salvo of cruise missiles fired at the Shayrat airbase near Homs marked the full extent of the US president’s response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of a nerve agent against his own people.

Donald Trump's Syrian airstrike 'significant blow to US-Russia relations', says Kremlin – live Read more

The ostensible aim was to punish Assad for using chemical weapons and to deter him from doing so again. What happens next will depend largely on Assad and his Russian backers.

It seems unlikely he would risk escalating US involvement in Syria through more chemical attacks, but then it is a mystery why he would have taken such a risk in the first place.



The Syrian leader may simply have misjudged Trump, taking him at his word when he strongly opposed US military action after the 2013 sarin attacks and when he signalled his intent to focus on fighting Islamic State and other jihadis.

Vladimir Putin has already made his own first counter-move, suspending the “deconfliction channel” between the US and Russian militaries, which allowed them to tell each other where they were sending their planes so they did not collide.

It forces the US to severely limit its air campaign against Isis or risk a head-on clash with Russia that could spiral out of control. It could mean Russian and Syrian radars start locking on to US and allied planes as they approach Syrian airspace, which might unnerve some allies and encourage them to leave the coalition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vladimir Putin could raise the stakes after US airstrike. Photograph: Pavel Golovkin / Pool/EPA

Moscow has left the door open for a deal. It has only announced the suspension of deconfliction, and the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has said the situation is not irreversible.



Putin’s negotiating position will depend a lot on whether Moscow was complicit in the use of chemical weapons. Pentagon officials said there was a Russian military presence at Shayrat, so the chemical attack appears to have been launched from under Russian noses. In Rex Tillerson’s words, “either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been incompetent”.

If Russia was complicit in the chemical weapons attack, with the aim of demonstrating US impotence in Syria, Putin could raise the stakes. If he was taken by surprise by Assad’s recklessness, he will look to mend relations with the US as fast as possible and focus pressure on Damascus to end the use of its covert chemical arsenal.

Tillerson will find out more about Russia’s stance when he arrives in Moscow for his first visit as secretary of state. That meeting is likely to be far more tense than Putin expected – it being with a man whom he had given the Order of Friendship in 2013, when the Texan was the head of ExxonMobil and looking for oil deals.

Putin is believed by US intelligence to have used various “active measures” to skew the 2016 American election in Trump’s favour. That investment is having unintended consequences now. Trump has been prevented by political constraints from granting sanctions relief to Russia. He has vowed to carry out a huge armament programme, nuclear and conventional, that will make it extremely costly for Putin to keep up. And now he has taken direct military action against a close Kremlin ally, something Barack Obama shied away from.

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Tillerson’s Moscow trip will also be a test for the Trump administration. On Thursday, the secretary of state said that despite the strikes the US had not changed its objectives in Syria, ie fighting Isis first, leaving efforts towards a broader peace deal and transition until later. “There has been no change in that status,” he said.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Image released by the US Department of Defense shows the Shayrat airfield in Syria. Photograph: HO/AFP/Getty Images

If that remains the case, Russia would be allowed to continue to help Assad demolish Syrian cities but with conventional bombs rather than a nerve agent.

But if Trump is determined to get rid of Assad, and use his military leverage to do so, there can be no return to the status quo.

Russia can be expected to challenge the US at the UN security council over the legality of the US attack. Tillerson attempted to sketch out an argument that it was a preventative strike to stop chemical weapons getting into the hands of terrorists who could use them against the US. But that tenuous self-defence justification was weakened by the Pentagon’s insistence that the goal of the strike was not to destroy chemical weapons. In fact, it took great pains to avoid bombing any sites where chemical weapons may have been stored, for fear of causing civilian casualties downwind.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trump ordered the attack just before having dinner with Xi Jinping. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The Trump administration will also face legal challenges from a Congress that has not authorised acts of war in Syria, but only from a minority. On the whole it will consolidate support on the hawkish end of the Republican party, which has been most anxious about his links with Moscow. Whether or not it contributed to the decision to strike, the fallout is likely to help Trump deflect attention from the multiple investigation into possible collusion between his associates and the Russian government.

The first foreigner given the opportunity to assess the real significance of the airstrikes was Xi Jinping, who dined with Trump on Thursday night in Florida and sat down again with for a working meeting on Friday morning. It is not yet clear whether Trump informed the Chinese president of his decision over the dinner table. Either way, it will have made for an awkward encounter right after breakfast.

Speaking briefly after the meeting, Trump made no mention of his decision and ignored shouted questions on whether he would also consider military action against North Korea. Trump spoke only about the relationship with China which he claimed “tremendous progress” had been made in the one-day summit.

However limited Trump claims the aims of the strikes were, their ramifications will be global. Xi will have to recalculate what Trump might do if North Korea continues its missile and nuclear tests, or if Chinese and US forces collide unexpectedly in the South China Sea. He will look across the conference table at a president who has shown himself willing to pull the trigger on some of the most powerful conventional weapons in the world.

