Listen as Larry spoke with Elliot Abrams, a Contributor for The Weekly Standard and a Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, about his latest article, The Strike At Syria.
Abrams addressed President Trump’s change of heart on Syria and Assad:
O’Connor: For those who voted for candidate Donald Trump hoping to have a some-what non-interventionist kind of foreign policy and certainly one where he specifically articulated that he wasn’t enthused to go after Assad and the regime in Syria, you would agree Elliot Abrams that this is a 180 from that position?
Abrams: I think it is. And you know, it reminds me of a little something that Ariel Sharon use to say all the time when he was Prime Minister of Israel because he did some 180s. And he would say to people who criticized him, ‘What you see from here, is not what you see from there’ meaning, what you see from the Prime Minister’s office sitting behind that desk, is different from when you’re just sitting in Parliament or you’re writing op-eds or you’re a politician. And that’s certainly true for the President of The United States. You know, it’s different than any other position on the face of the earth. So it is a 180. On the other hand, you know he’s always been talking about making America great again, right? And so I think he’s come around to view that greatness for America includes leading the world.
Abrams also addressed how Trump’s strike in Syria sets a different tone from that of the Obama administration:
O’Connor: But wait, this is what Secretary Tillerson said yesterday hours before our military strike. Here it is.
Audio:
Reporter: So will you and President Trump organize an international coalition to remove Assad?
Tillerson: Those steps are underway.O’Connor: That goes well beyond we want him gone. That’s we are organizing an international coalition to remove this man.
Abrams: Well I don’t think … if that is mean’t as a military coalition to go in and remove him, so we’ll send 10,000 troops, you send 10,000 troops, I don’t believe that is what Tillerson meant. And later he said something when he and McMaster did their press conference explaining the strike, he said something really quite different. He said, in the end, in the midst of that, and that’s organizing the local forces, we will start a political process to resolve Syria’s future, in Geneva this is, that ultimately in our view will lead to the resolution of Bashar al-Assad’s departure. So I don’t think there is any thought here on the part of the President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense of sending lots of troops into Syria to remove Assad and produce a different government.
I think we’re talking about a negotiation here, but if you want to negotiate something the battlefield has to look different. The mistake John Kerry & Barack Obama made was they kept trying to negotiate something but you never get to the table something that is different from the situation on the ground. There are no freebies from the Russians and the Iranians. So this does begin to change the situation on the ground. If Assad uses chemical weapons again, I’m sure the President will hit them again. Now they have to think a little bit differently about the situation on the ground. This is extremely helpful for the morale of the opposition and others like the Saudis, Turks, the Jordanians who are helping in Syria. So I don’t think we are getting into a war here, but what we are saying is the Russians and Iranians won’t have it free anymore. It’s not a case of where the United States won’t ever do anything anymore.
An excerpt of Abrams’ article is below:
The Trump administration has had a rocky start. There was the defeat on Obamacare, staffing the departments has been far too slow, the National Security Advisor lasted only three weeks, there has clearly been infighting in the White House staff, and there have certainly been too many tweets.
But that 75-day break-in period has just ended, and the Trump administration can truly be said to have started only now. The president has been chief executive since January 20, but this week he acted also as Commander in Chief. And more: He finally accepted the role of Leader of the Free World. [Read More]
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