How the Syria Strike Flipped the U.S.-Russia Power Dynamic
MOSCOW—The American airstrike on the Shayrat air base in Syria didn’t do all that much. A day and 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles later, Bashar al-Assad was still in power, his planes were still taking off from Shayrat, still flying and still dropping bombs and killing people in the same areas of Idlib Province where a sarin gas attack killed more than 80 people last week. What the strike did do, though, was radically alter the power dynamic between Moscow and Washington that Vladimir Putin had spent the last three years establishing: one in which Putin acts and Washington, gobsmacked, scrambles to react.
By the time Secretary of State Rex Tillerson landed here on Tuesday night, it was Moscow that was trying to find the right response to an American president who, , completely inverted an isolationist message he had stuck to for. And by the time Tillerson wrapped up his meetings in Moscow, Trump was singing hosannas to Xi Jinping, leader of a country he had previously vowed to label a currency manipulator, while taking the stage with NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg and declaring that, suddenly, NATO was “no longer obsolete,” as Trump had maintained during the campaign.
