In his new book "Fear," Bob Woodward recounts that in April 2017, after President Trump saw images of dead Syrian children with their mouths foaming from a sarin attack, he called Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and issued an order: Get me a plan for a military strike to take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"Let's f -- ing kill him!" Trump told Mattis, according to the book. "Let's go in. Let's kill the f -- ing lot of them." Mattis, Woodward writes, assured the president that "he would get right on it." But as soon as Mattis hung up the phone, he told a senior aide: "We're not going to do any of that." Instead, Woodward says, the defense secretary gave Trump options for more-limited strikes.
Today, as Assad menaces 3 million civilians in the last rebel stronghold, the Idlib province, it's clear that Trump's instinct was right. We should have taken out the Syrian dictator last year.
When Trump was elected in 2016, many worried that he would usher in a new age of American isolationism and withdrawal. That hasn't happened. Trump has pursued a foreign policy that is not only not isolationist but also a significant improvement over his predecessor's.
In Syria, while Trump did not eliminate Assad, he did enforce President Barack Obama's red line against the use of chemical weapons, punishing violations not once but twice -- and restoring America's credibility on the world stage. Last week, Trump launched the U.S.-led coalition's assault on the Islamic State's last stronghold on the Syrian-Iraqi border, which will eliminate its physical caliphate. And unlike Obama, Trump is not taking America's boot off the terrorists' necks. The Post reports that the president has approved a new strategy that "indefinitely extends the military effort" in Syria until a government acceptable to all Syrians is established and all Iranian military and proxy forces are driven out. Conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan, a die-hard isolationist, recently asked: "Is Trump Going Neocon in Syria?"
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/09/19/marc-thiessen-chaos-or-not-trump-is-racking-up-record-foreign-policy-success.html