President Trump’s decision to launch missile strikes against Syria’s Shayrat airfield after a chemical weapons attack on civilians was an appropriate response to an act of unspeakable horror. Yet as analysts who have argued for greater U.S. military engagement to end the Syrian civil war, we find ourselves conflicted about the president’s decision: We fear there is simply no plan for what comes next.

To succeed beyond Thursday’s limited strikes, American leaders must decide on a clear set of objectives, a realistic desired final outcome, a theory of the case for how to get there and a solid understanding of the risks. We see three potential options for how the president could move forward.

The United States could pursue a limited strategy focused on one-off strikes in response to the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons. In that case, the strike on the air base from which this week’s chemical attack was launched will probably be enough. President Bashar al-Assad and his generals will get the message and stop using those types of weapons.

However, Trump may soon find this outcome dissatisfying. The regime will continue to terrorize civilians through airstrikes, artillery and surface-to-surface missiles against densely populated areas. It will continue to employ tactics such as starvation sieges and population transfers to tear communities apart.

Pictures of dead children and “beautiful babies,” as the president remarked, will continue to appear on television. And Assad’s forces and their Russian allies may up the scale of attacks to humiliate Trump and demonstrate the fecklessness of American military force. Thus, the pressure may grow on the United States to respond, and it may be hard for Trump to resist. The United States may slowly start to expand its objectives and escalate the conflict, and eventually find itself in a situation similar to Libya in 2012, where a limited civilian protection mission morphed into a full-blown regime change operation.

Alternatively, the administration could pursue a broader set of interests than strictly deterring chemical weapon use. These initiatives could, for instance, prioritize ending the Syrian civil war and closing the security vacuums that are the source of extremist attacks and massive refugee flows destabilizing American partners in the Middle East and Europe.

To achieve these objectives, the United States would threaten to launch more missiles on Assad regime targets unless Assad and his Russian allies stopped attacking civilians in opposition-held territory. The United States could target a wide array of facilities to compel Assad, such as weapons factories, major military bases, even ministries in Damascus responsible for the war effort. Using the threat of missile strikes instead of flying in manned aircraft to drop bombs is much less dangerous. The United States would not have to first destroy all of Syria’s air defenses — a highly provocative step sure to result in Russian fatalities, because Russian advisers help operate many of these systems. With the Russian and regime bombardment from the air stopped, the United States would then work with moderate armed groups in opposition areas to marginalize extremists and stabilize this territory.

This approach is risky. Russians are deployed throughout Syria, whether at regime bases or in a close advising role embedded with Assad’s forces on the front lines of the civil war. If the U.S. military inadvertently kills a significant number of Russians, tensions between the world’s two largest nuclear weapons states could skyrocket. The United States can try to warn Russia in advance of the targets it is striking, as it reportedly did with the strike this week, but the risks go up as the target lists become more expansive.

Moreover, this approach requires a viable moderate armed opposition that can serve as an effective local partner on the ground. Such groups exist in southern and eastern Syria but have become much weaker in the hotly contested northwest, where last week’s chemical weapons attacks occurred.

A final military option would be to pressure Assad from the south, where the United States and Jordan support a moderate coalition of armed opposition groups known as the Southern Front. In recent years, these forces have generally stabilized the areas of Syria bordering Israel and Jordan, and have fought hard against the Islamic State. But the Southern Front has also been restrained by the United States and Jordan, who have preferred a stable front near Jordan’s border and have threatened to cut off military support if the alliance moved too aggressively. If the restraints came off, this moderate rebel force could soon be bearing down on Damascus, putting huge pressure on the regime.

But this would require a major surge in fighting in an area that has been largely quiet the past few years. The regime would probably respond with the same scorched-earth tactics it has used elsewhere, and civilians would suffer. Moreover, the Southern Front may achieve catastrophic success and inadvertently topple Assad quickly, resulting in chaos. In that case, Jordan and Israel would feel the destabilizing effects of intensified fighting on their borders.

In the end, all of these military options are useless if they cannot be translated into a political outcome. The three military options outlined above can provide the United States with leverage in negotiations with Russia, Iran, Assad, Turkey and the Gulf States — but only if Trump has a clear view of the end he is seeking.

The most viable political goal is a Syria that remains whole as one nation, but with a governance model that would feature power devolved away from the central government to local actors who hold the territory in six different zones of control that now divide the country. This idea reflects the realities on the ground and has grown in support among experts as the war has dragged on.

Such an outcome would require a major diplomatic lift to mediate an arrangement between the Turks and Kurds in the north. The United States would have to come to a settlement with Russia and Iran on who retakes the territory currently held by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. And we would need to assure Israel and Saudi Arabia that Iranian influence in Syria will be contained.

Unfortunately, it is this final and most important part of any plan for Syria — the political plan — which we are most concerned about when viewing the Trump administration’s approach.

We disagreed with former president Barack Obama when he insisted on too much certainty before taking any action in Syria. War does not always work that way: Sometimes, you have to take risks and jump into the breach.

But when it comes to Trump, we have yet to see any indicators that he has a broader political approach in mind. Less than a week ago, his team was arguing that removing Assad is unrealistic and that, instead of focusing on the civil war in western Syria, they would prioritize the effort in the east against the Islamic State. The president himself spent two years campaigning on opposition to deeper U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and his team has yet to engage seriously in any of the diplomatic processes surrounding the Syrian conflict — including the intensive talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, hosted by the Russians, or a major international Syria reconstruction conference held this past week in Brussels. And — most concerning of all — they have de-emphasized diplomacy, aid and reconstruction as tools of American foreign policy by calling for dramatic financial cuts for all these efforts and making clear to the international community that the United States is stepping back from coordinating these efforts.

If the United States is to turn the limited tactical strikes in Syria into a real strategic gain, the Trump team will have to change its approach, and focus not only on winning the war but also on winning the peace.

This week, it was the images — gruesome photos of a chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians — that moved Trump, pushing the president, who ran on an “America first” platform of nonintervention, to authorize the launch of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Syrian targets Thursday night.

Senior administration officials and members of Congress who spoke with Trump said the president was especially struck by two images: young, listless children being splashed with water in a frantic attempt to cleanse them of the nerve agent; and an anguished father holding his twin babies, swathed in soft white fabric, poisoned to death.

As the carnage unfolded on cable news, which the president watches throughout the day and deep into the night, Trump turned to his senior staff, talking about how “horrible” and “awful” the footage out of Syria was, said one top adviser.

“What the world saw last night was the United States commander in chief, and also a father and grandfather,” Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, said Friday. “The world recoiled in horror at babies writhing and struggling to live. And who could avert their gaze — and that includes our very tough, very resolute, very decisive president.”

Horrific images were not the only reason military action made sense for Trump. Whatever his concern for the people of Syria — a country whose refugees would not be able to enter the United States for 120 days under Trump’s latest travel ban proposal — he has been eager to show a clear victory more than two months into his tumultuous young presidency.

A strike against Syria could help him demonstrate independence from Russia and its president, Vladi­mir Putin, whose alleged efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential race have proved a major distraction. And Trump wants to show that he is a tougher and stronger leader than Obama, who received scathing criticism when he drew a “red line” with Syria over its use of chemical weapons and then declined to act when President Bashar al-Assad bounded over it.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Friday questioned Trump’s “24-hour pivot on Syria policy,” noting that until Assad’s regime launched its chemical attack, Trump had not made Syria a priority. White House press secretary Sean Spicer had told reporters last week that the United States had to accept the “political reality” of Assad’s grip on power.

“There is no strategy on Syria,” Murphy said. “He clearly made this decision based off an emotional reaction to the images on TV, and it should worry everyone about the quixotic nature of this administration’s foreign policy and their potential disdain for the warmaking authority of the United States Congress.”

Throughout the week, Trump’s public remarks placed a special emphasis on the youngest victims. “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies, babies, little babies, with a chemical gas that is so lethal — people were shocked to hear what gas it was,” Trump said Wednesday afternoon in the Rose Garden, where he appeared at a news conference with King Abdullah II of Jordan. “That crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line — many, many lines.”

On Thursday, when a subdued Trump addressed the nation, he spoke of “beautiful babies” cruelly murdered, declaring, “No child of God should ever suffer such horror.”

About 54 hours after receiving news of the attacks in his daily briefing Tuesday morning, Trump — by then at his private Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping — gave the order to target Shayrat air base.

At 7:40 p.m. Thursday, as Trump and Xi were midway through a meal of pan-seared Dover sole with champagne sauce and dry-aged prime New York strip steak (a Trump favorite), a naval destroyer launched the first of nearly five dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, lighting up the sky in eastern Syria.

White House aides and Trump deputies said that while the photos clearly affected Trump, he made his final decision after consulting with his advisers in a process they described as deliberative and thorough.

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.

“I don’t think it was an emotional reaction at all,” said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was involved in the discussions. “President Trump evaluated the facts, that the attacks occurred on his watch, and [as he] reflected upon prior responses or lack of responses, he came to the conclusion that we cannot yet again turn away, turn a blind eye from what’s happened.”

But the process was especially — and perhaps intentionally — quick, in contrast to the style of Obama, who prided himself on making decisions based on information, not emotions, a manner his critics derided as “dithering,” as former vice president Richard B. Cheney put it early in Obama’s first term.

Trump learned of the chemical attack Tuesday morning, asked for options on how to respond Wednesday and received them Thursday, the day he authorized the strike.

He asked the Defense Department to prepare potential responses after the Pentagon assessed that the Syrian military was responsible for Tuesday’s chemical strike and for chemical attacks March 25 and March 30 against civilians near Hama air base, U.S. military officials said.

U.S. Central Command has had plans for striking the Syrian government for years and has significant assets in the region, enabling a quick response once a decision was made.

The National Security Council deliberated Wednesday night, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other senior officials discussed the possibilities, senior military officials said. Ultimately, aides presented Trump with three options, but the president narrowed them to two and asked aides to flesh out more details.

Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security, where Mattis was recently a member of the board, said the options probably included doing nothing and launching more comprehensive airstrikes involving bombers and jets.

“I suspect that they said if you are going to do something, they need to do it quickly,” Fontaine said. “You need to not hand-wring about this for weeks.”

Thursday, Trump held another meeting aboard Air Force One as he flew to Palm Beach, Fla. Some officials — including national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon — joined him in the plane’s wood-paneled conference room, with others piped in via secure videoconference from Washington as the presidential jet streaked southward.

Once on the ground in Florida, aides said, Trump gave Mattis the order to move forward. The defense secretary passed it along to Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Gen. Joseph L. Votel, chief of U.S. Central Command.

The missiles were launched about three hours later, at 3:40 a.m. local time, to minimize civilian casualties.

In the process, the president — who had championed an “America first” worldview rooted in the belief that U.S. foreign policy had become too interventionist — appeared to swing sharply in the other direction.

Thursday’s strike also raised several uncomfortable, still-unanswered questions: Was Trump motivated to attack Syria in part because Obama never did? Was he driven by a need for a political victory, at home and abroad? And what is the administration’s long-term strategy and goal in Syria?

It was unclear as well whether Trump fully considered the ramifications of his decision. Russia, whose president has supported Assad and whose troops operate inside Syria, reacted initially with pique, canceling a key air agreement designed to avoid military confrontations with U.S. forces in the skies, before later agreeing to restore the deal.

Though Trump had often seemed to blame Obama for the situation in Syria, his remarks Thursday night from Mar-a-Lago were nonpartisan and intentionally so, a senior adviser said.

The president, this adviser added, was sending a message not only to Syria and Russia but also to China, whose president was in Palm Beach for their summit, and to North Korea that Trump and the United States will not “shirk or shrink” from conflict.

On Friday, Spicer, the press secretary, initially told reporters at Mar-a-Lago that he would offer an update on Syria in front of the news cameras. But just before he was to begin his briefing, he reversed himself: He wanted images of the president, both from the night before on Syria and the China summit Friday, to carry the day.

Mike DeBonis, Adam Entous, Greg Jaffe and Abby Phillip contributed to this report.

“We ask for God’s wisdom as we face the challenge of our very troubled world,” he continued. “We pray for the lives of the wounded and for the souls of those who have passed and we hope that as long as America stands for justice then peace and harmony will in the end prevail.”

[U.S. strike against Syria: How did we get here?]

The missiles were launched from two Navy destroyers — the USS Ross and USS Porter — in the eastern Mediterranean. They struck an airbase called Shayrat in Homs province, which is the site from which the planes that conducted the chemical attack in Idlib are believed to have originated. The targets included air defenses, aircraft, hangars and fuel.

The military said initial indications were that the strike had “severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure.”

Syrian state TV said a U.S. missile attack hit a number of military targets inside the country, calling the attack an “aggression,” according to the Associated Press.

U.S. officials said the Russians, who maintain significant forces in Syria, were given advance warning of the strike. There is a Russian military area at the base that was hit, but the U.S. took precautions not to strike that area, according to Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman.

In comparison, the start of the Iraq war in 2003 saw the use of roughly 500 cruise missiles and 47 were fired at the opening of the anti-Islamic State campaign in Syria in 2014.

[These are the missiles the U.S. used in the strike against Syria]

The attack may put hundreds of American troops now stationed in Syria in greater danger. They are advising local forces in advance of a major assault on the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital.

The decision to strike follows 48 hours of intense deliberations by U.S. officials, and represents a significant break with the previous administration’s reluctance to wade militarily into the Syrian civil war and shift any focus from the campaign against the Islamic State.

Senior White House officials met on the issue of Syria Wednesday evening in a session that lasted into early Thursday, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, have communicated repeatedly since Tuesday’s chemical attack, the officials said.

The U.S. Central Command has had plans for striking the Syrian government for years and currently has significant assets in the region, enabling a quick response once a decision was made.

While the Obama White House began operations against the Islamic State in 2014, it backed away from a planned assault on Syrian government sites a year earlier after a similar chemical attack on Syrian civilians.

Tuesday’s apparent nerve gas attack in northern Idlib, with its widely circulated images of lifeless children, appears to have galvanized Trump and some of his top advisers to harden their position against the Syrian leader.

The assault adds new complexity to Syria’s prolonged conflict, which includes fighters battling the Syrian government and others focused on combatting the Islamic State, which despite over two years of American and allied attacks remains a potent force.

[Deadly nerve agent sarin used in Syria attack, Turkish Health Ministry says]

The Trump administration’s position on the strongman appears to have quickly shifted in the wake of the chemical attack, as senior officials voiced new criticism of the Syrian leader.

On Thursday night, McMaster predicted the strikes would result in a “big shift on Assad’s calculus. It’s the first time United States has taken direct military action.”

McMaster described a deliberative process inside the White House and National Security Council, where three options were examined at the request of the president. Trump made the final decision and the strike “clearly indicate the president is willing to take decisive action when called for.” He emphasized, however, that the move did not otherwise alter the U.S. military’s posture in Syria.

Earlier Thursday, Tillerson suggested that the United States and other nations would consider somehow removing Assad from power, but he did not say how. Just a few days ago, the White House had said that removing Assad was not realistic with press secretary Sean Spicer saying it was necessary to accept the “political reality” in Syria.

“We are considering an appropriate response for this chemical weapons attack,” Tillerson said in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump was meeting Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “It is a serious matter. It requires a serious response,” he said.

Speaking later Thursday, Tillerson recalled a 2013 agreement with Syria to hand over its chemical stockpile and for Russia to monitor that Assad not renege on that deal: “Clearly, Russia has failed in its responsibility on that commitment. Either Russia has been complicit or has been incompetent on its ability to deliver,” he said.

The summit with the Chinese leader will continue Friday, and some U.S. officials believe the strike will also serve as a warning of U.S. willingness to strike North Korea, if China does not act to curtail the nuclear ambitions of the government there.

[Trump condemns Syria chemical attack and suggests he will act]

It was not immediately clear whether Thursday’s assault marked the beginning of a broader campaign against the Assad government. While Thursday’s operation was the first intentional attack on Syrian government targets, the United States accidentally struck a group of Syrian soldiers in eastern Syria last year in what officials concluded was the result of human error.

The Obama administration had insisted that Assad could never remain in any postwar Syria, and it supported rebel groups that have tried unsuccessfully to oust him.

The United States has a broad arsenal already in the region, including dozens of strike aircraft on the USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft carrier that is deployed to the Middle East and accompanied by guided-missile destroyers and cruisers that can also launch Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Additionally, an amphibious naval force in the region includes the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit with Harrier jets and Cobra gunships. The Pentagon also has scores of aircraft in the region flying operations every day against the Islamic State group, including from Incirlik air base to the north in Turkey.

[‘The hospitals were slaughterhouses’: A journey into Syria’s secret torture wards]

The attack appears to have involved only missiles. U.S. fighter planes, if used, would have had to contend with a modest web of Syrian air defenses and potentially more advanced types of surface-to-air missiles provided by Russia.

One of Assad’s more prevalent systems, the S-200, was used to target Israeli jets last month, but missiles were intercepted by Israeli defense systems. The S-200 has a range of roughly 186 miles, according to U.S. military documents, and can hit targets flying at altitudes of around 130,000 feet.

They also called on the administration to take Assad’s air force out of the fight and follow “through with a new, comprehensive strategy in coordination with our allies and partners to end the conflict in Syria.”

David Nakamura in Palm Beach, Fla., and Abby Phillip, Anne Gearan, Carol Morello and David Weigel in Washington contributed to this report.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-weighing-military-options-following-chemical-weapons-attack-in-syria/2017/04/06/0c59603a-1ae8-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?pushid=58e6e9759de27e1d0000000b&tid=notifi_push_breaking-news&utm_term=.6b9b57559c90