Boris Johnson cancels Moscow visit over Syrian chemical weapons attack

Let’s end the politically correct agenda that doesn’t put America first. It is a well-known fact that it was Russian Federation which came to Assad’s rescue when he was on the verge of being demised during the Syrian revolt in 2014. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whose close ties to Russian Federation raised questions during his confirmation hearings, slammed Moscow for either being “complicit” in the chemical weapons attack or “incompetent”.

Trump would say he’s simply flexible, an emerging foreign policy doctrine that leaves room for evolution and uncertainty. Trump’s emotion was real-and raw.

With an attack on a Syrian air base, the United States has now bombed the two main players in Syrian war – President Bashar Assad’s military and the Islamic State.

Over an intensive 2½ days, the President’s national security team convened several high-level meetings with representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, intelligence agencies and the National Security Council. Even Corker, who praised the decision, described in emotional terms Trump’s public condemnation in the Rose Garden Thursday of the April 4 chemical attacks. Trump had to make a choice.

There is a “high degree of confidence” that the chemical unleashed was “a nerve agent like sarin” that can short-circuit the nervous system within seconds, they said.

The former Cold War adversaries are once again spiraling into confrontation, punctuated by a USA attack on a military base controlled by Syrian President Bashar Assad, Russia’s client.

While Trump’s militarism, unfortunately, may be harder to constrain, the fact that the air strikes were fairly limited may be indicative that he recognizes that the American public is not interested in the United States getting involved in another major Middle Eastern war.

New airstrikes targeted a town in Syria that was hit by a chemical attack earlier this week, activists said, less than a day after the U.S. bombarded a Syrian air base to “send a message” to the Assad regime.

Sean Spicer, Mr Trump’s spokesman, said the president had acted in line with his constitutional obligation to defend U.S. security. The message: Get your folks off the Shayrat air base, near the city of Homs, right away. Removing Mr. Assad would undermine what Mr. Trump has long called his key foreign policy objective – defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and the other most risky Islamists who have destabilized much of the Middle East. But the impact was still stunning.

On Friday, hours after the U.S. missile strike, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the Western allegations were “bogus”.

“This move by Washington has dealt a serious blow to Russian-U.S. relations, which are already in a poor state”, Dmitry Peskov, a Putin spokesman, said after the attack.

Trump has cast his decision to strike Syria as driven by humanitarian and strategic interests.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has the support of Russian Federation and Iran. Then mostly US personnel carried out the destruction at sea. And the third thing is, what’s going to happen among the very divided opposition groups in Syria? As the mideast analyst Lee Smith has written, the Obama administration seemed blithely indifferent to that reality. But the Syrian civil war is a complicated and bloody tangle of state and non-state actors, which would require Trump find a winning path where the Obama administration foundered. As a sombre Trump noted, the world could not let such a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention-not to mention civilized norms-go unpunished.

“I’m not, and I don’t want to be, the president of the world”, he said. Meanwhile Moscow, whose forces are integrated with Syria’s (as are Iran’s), remains a huge obstacle.

As abruptly as those Tomahawk missiles were unleashed, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson bluntly put the blame on Russian Federation. It would be better for everyone if both sides instead worked out a coordinated strategy, with the burden on China to tighten the sanctions noose around North Korea until it returns to the negotiating table in a more amenable frame of mind.

Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said he supported the strikes.

Moscow couldn’t remain silent after the US attack.