While President Trump’s missile strike has been met with approval in the international community, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is the conspicuous exception. Russia is shocked, shocked that Trump would attack a sovereign country. The government of the Ukraine, so far as is known, has yet to comment. The Russians have moved a warship to the Eastern Mediterranean from where the middle strike took place and has frozen communications between American and Russian forces within Syria.
The Kremlin is warning of dire consequences to follow.
One of those dire consequences may be the revealing of Moscow’s role in the Sarin Gas Attack. The base from which the attack was launch contains a Russian garrison. The idea that Moscow was unaware that Syria has a poison gas stockpile and then set out to use it defies the laugh test. The Washington Times is reporting that the United States is investigating whether or not Russian warplanes bombed a hospital where the Sarin has victims had been taken as part of an effort to cover up the attack.
Deliberately attacking a hospital, killing both doctors and patients, is as much of a war crime as gassing children.
If the Trump administration is disposed to, it can press that matter thoroughly for any length of time it wants. It could demand that those responsible for carrying out the attack be handed over to the proper authorities and put on trial. Putin will never allow that to happen, but the effort would serve nicely to harass his regime and to undermine whatever moral high ground it thinks it has.
Needless to say, the United States going after Russia for war crimes would tend to undermine the whole narrative that Trump is somehow Putin’s Manchurian candidate. One does not have to be an MSNBC conspiracy nut to recognize that this change in narrative is all to the good for the White House. The Democrats have been pushing the absurd notion of Russia having put Trump into power with cyber espionage techniques for so long that one could be forgiven for wondering whether they have lost their reason.
What comes next is anyone’s guess. Trump has amped up his world standing quite a bit by proving that he is someone, unlike his predecessor, who is willing to act if necessary. President Obama practiced the art of strategic paralysis as if he had to work at it, with the result that much of the world is in turmoil. Trump has taken a significant step in setting that situation aright. Putin and all enemies of peace and freedom have been warned.