Trump's Chemical Weapons Warning Suggests He's Willing to Go to War in Syria

The White House warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad on Monday that he would "pay a heavy price" for a new chemical attack lays out a test of President Donald Trump’s own still-developing policy on the crisis in Syria, where as many as a half million people have died since 2011. Since April, Trump’s administration has dramatically shifted the U.S. approach to the Assad regime, taking a confrontational stance that threatens to remake the contours of Syria’s six-year-old civil war. The White House’s threat of further hostilities -- citing "potential" evidence of preparations of a new chemical attack -- raises the possibility of a widening conflict with the Syrian regime or its Russian and Iranian allies.

“What the U.S. is intending to do with this statement is remind the Assad regime of the new posture of the United States under president Trump,” said Lina Khatib, the head of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House in London. “It’s more about U.S. posturing than a change in U.S. policy toward Syria,” she added in a phone interview with TIME.
On April 6, Trump ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian military airbase in response to a sarin attack that killed more than 70 people, including civilians, in Syria’s Idlib province. The strike ended six years in which the U.S. avoided direct conflict with Assad, even while it supported elements of the armed insurrection against him in the aftermath of the popular uprisings that consumed Arab states in 2011.
Since the missile strike, U.S. forces have struck pro-Assad forces four times, culminating a week ago when an American fighter jet shot down a Syrian bomber after it attacked American-allied militias on the ground in eastern Syria. It was the first time the U.S. military shot down a foreign jet in more than a decade, marking a sharp escalation in hostilities with Assad. The strike infuriated Russia, whose military threatened to track American aircraft as targets in the skies over the western part of Syria.
Trump’s administration has also deepened U.S. involvement in the land war in Syria, where American troops are supporting a Kurdish-majority militia force battling the forces of the Islamic state. The militias, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, are now advancing into the city of Raqqa, ISIS’ de facto capital. As a result, the U.S. is now vying with rival powers, including the Assad regime, for control of land in eastern Syria seized from ISIS. Pro-Assad troops reached the Syrian-Iraqi border earlier in June, blocking the advances of another American-backed proxy force on the ground.Analysts said the White House statement could be intended to send a message to Assad, Russia, and Iran about U.S. intentions in the strategic context in Syria’s east, but the statement caught officials at the Pentagon and the State Department by surprise, according to several news reports. The statement made no reference to the sources of any intelligence it may have been based on.