Tensions are high between the US and North Korea after US President Donald Trump promised 'fire and fury'. Credit:AP On Thursday night, US time, Trump took the step that his predecessor Barack Obama hadn't, and launched a cruise missile attack against a Syrian air force base. Adding to the nagging sense of impending global disorder, Trump ordered the strike from his Florida retreat Mar-a-Lago, where he was in the midst of a summit with the Chinese President Xi Jinping. Topping their agenda was the rapid advancement of North Korea's nuclear missile program. Trump's public statement regarding the strike was delayed because Mar-a-Lago is not as well equipped for such communications as the White House. The immediate repercussions of the strike in an increasingly fraught and unstable world are not yet clear and Trump's brief and apparently unscripted public comments provided little certainty.

The USS Porter launches a missile towards a Syrian air force base. Credit:US Navy/AP "It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons," he said at one point. Did this mean that this single strike concluded military operations against Assad? Moments later, he added, "Tonight I call on all civilised nations to join us in seeking to end the slaughter and bloodshed in Syria." A child victim of the chemical attack is treated at a makeshift hospital. Credit:AP Did this mean he was seeking to create a coalition to defeat Assad?

And what does it mean for relations with Assad's staunch allies, Russia and Iran? Within hours of the statement, Reuters was reporting – based on comments from an unnamed source – that the strike was a "one-off". Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is an ally of Russia and Iran. Credit:AP Even before the missiles slammed into the Syrian airbase though, Russia had chastised Trump for being so quick to blame chemical attack on Assad, who is, along with Iran, a key Russian ally. "We would welcome a more considered approach," President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Thursday. "This is a dangerous and heinous crime, but it's hasty to put labels on it." Trump's relationship with Putin only adds to the complexity of the situation. Members of Trump's campaign and administration are under investigation for alleged links Russia, which is believed by US intelligence agencies to have used social media to support the Trump campaign. (A cynic might note that this strike serves to ameliorate Trump's snowballing domestic political problems.)

But even if the world were not already riven with a new period of instability, a US strike in the midst of a terrible and complex ongoing conflict would be cause for alarm for the broader international community. With the global diplomatic establishment still trying to come to terms with the Trump administration's goals and strategies, that uncertainty is compounded. The Trump doctrine Back in 2014 then president Obama believed he was being unfairly criticised for what he believed was a carefully considered foreign policy approach. His decision to set a rhetorical "red line" against any use of chemical weapons by Assad, only to walk away from it when Russia brokered a deal for the destruction of those weapons, had attracted particular derision. During an Air Force One flight he famously appeared unannounced and angry before the travelling members of the White House press corps and gave them an impromptu lecture on what became known as the Obama doctrine, the central tenet of which was, he said, "Don't do stupid shit".

Obama's point was that he believed the most serious errors of US policy in recent years were those of commission rather than omission. On Syria he believed it would be preferable to remove Assad's chemical weapons without directly engaging in yet another conflict. He believed that should America use military force to either punish or remove Assad he could neither walk away from the conflict nor predict how his actions would alter it. This was the Obama the world came to know, though not always admire – a restrained and reluctant warrior, happier to use the surgical force of drones and special forces rather than the might of the full US military. What the Trump doctrine might be is so far anyone's guess, but his rhetoric to date has not always been calming. In March last year the then Republican presidential aspirant was given one of his first high-level security briefings during which he reportedly asked questions that chilled some of those in the room. Three times in the space of an hour he asked his briefers why it was that America could not use nuclear weapons against its foes.

The story was revealed by the morning show host on the left-leaning MSNBC cable news station, Joe Scarborough – a former Republican congressman – as he was interviewing former CIA director Michael Hayden. "That's one of the reasons why he doesn't have foreign policy experts around him," Scarborough said after relating details of the meeting. That same month, 122 Republican foreign policy experts published an open letter saying that Trump was unqualified to run for the presidency. "His equation of business acumen with foreign policy experience is false. Not all lethal conflicts can be resolved as a real estate deal might, and there is no recourse to bankruptcy court in international affairs," they wrote. Though some observers welcomed the appointment of the former ExxonMobil boss Tillerson as Secretary of State, he has so far proved to be at best an inscrutable chief diplomat for Trump. Last week The Washington Post reported that he remains isolated from his own senior diplomats, going so far as to order staff not to make eye contact with him as he treks to his suite of offices in the State Department's vast Washington, DC headquarters. As he prepared for talks this week with Xi, Trump also ramped up American rhetoric against North Korea, which is rapidly advancing its nuclear weapons capability.

In an interview with the Financial Times on Monday, Trump said the US would act on the North Korean situation unilaterally if he could not find a way to do so with China. "Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you," he said during an Oval Office interview. Sending a message all of his own, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un responded by firing off another test missile on Wednesday. Compounding the issue to a diplomatic establishment that is struggling to read the semaphore emanating from the White House and the State Department is the civil war within the Trump administration. Trump might argue that his unpredictability – by comparison to his predecessor – is in fact a strength. Indeed this was a point he made time and again during his election campaign when he railed at the Obama administration for flagging its potential future military actions to the world. So far the State Department has said that Russian military forces were made aware of the strike before it went ahead, in keeping with so-called "deconfliction" protocols put in place to stop the two militaries accidently engaging one another, but it is not yet known if the White House quietly flagged the strike with the Kremlin.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has made it clear that key members of the international coalition fighting the Islamic State were notified of the strike before it took place. This was, said Turnbull, a "calibrated, proportional and targeted response" that would degrade the Syrian air force's capacity to deploy such weapons in future. By coincidence, hours before the strike Hillary Clinton advocated for a similar course of action. Speaking at a conference in New York the former secretary of state and presidential contender observed that the Syrian "air force is the cause of most of the civilian deaths" and suggested that Democrats "should have been more willing to confront Assad" after previous chemical attacks. It should be remembered that though punitive missile strikes were not part of the Obama administration's playbook, they were employed by previous presidents. How the strike will play out in immediate and practical terms is not yet clear. The alliance, that under the Trump administration was directing its might entirely against the Islamic State, has shifted focus with the American attack on Assad's air force. Loading

If this was a one-off attack, prosecuted with Russia's quiet, reluctant acquiescence, the focus might again return to the terrorists within the regime. But in this region, in this time, nothing is ever certain.