Trump Must Avoid the Obama Red-Line Trap on Syria
Failure to make good on a threat did lasting damage to U.S. credibility.
The world was watching. Especially Putin.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Some foreign policy controversies are all-consuming in the moment but soon fade into history; others loom larger as time passes. The Syria “red line” incident of 2013 falls into the latter category. The fifth anniversary of that episode is upon us, at a time when fears of chemical weapons attacks by Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — and a potential U.S. military response — are again rising.
The original incident unleashed vitriolic debates about coercive diplomacy, credibility and U.S. strategy. Those debates are worth revisiting now, as the Donald Trump administration confronts a Syrian civil war that is intensifying in dangerous ways.