I have no idea what to make of Trump's airstrike.

Well its a slight lie. I'm confused and worried.

Without wanting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld; there are known unknowns. Mostly though there are unknown unknowns. The Syrian War is so complicated and with so many atrocities committed on all sides, its hard to know whether slapping down Asad is more likely to lead to peace or not. There are conspiracy theories that this is a Trump/Putin master plan to get The Donald off the hook with the FBI investigation and there are also theories that Trump changed America's entire foreign policy position after watching the evening news. They can not both be true but there may be some truth in one of them, or none of them. Is this a long-term strategy or a ridiculous off-the cuff impulse or somewhere inbetween? Will bombing Assad weaken his position or strengthen the resolve of Putin and he? I dunno.

I am hoping that this is some kind of bluff because nobody wants tensions to escalate between Russia and America. The best way to achieve peace would be negotiation and stopping arm shipments from Iran and Saudi. This has always been a proxy war for regional and global powers though with each of them valuing their own objectives more than Syrian blood. Asad wants to stay in power and any cost, Russia back him because they want influence in the region. America was against him, then seemingly for him and now is seemingly against him. Nobody knows what America wants, what their strategy is or whether there even is one. When nuclear powers are in close proximity, this must be a worry.

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IvanKaramazov

One thing I do strongly suspect: the Donald is incapable of master plans. He has a couple of tricks for manipulating the media (assert something ludicrous on the basis of no evidence, using his position of relative power to leverage action that demands it be reported on) and his supporters (basically sell them a bill of goods, the way any common snake oil salesman does). But master plans? I've never seen it. "Pathological failure" is a more apt description of him. [Insert list of Trump's failed business ventures here.] He's only president right now because the Democrats put up a historically weak candidate.

If you look at his behavior over time, it's been erratic and marked by naked opportunism. He was a Democrat, then a Republican. He was against the war on drugs, now he thinks legal, recreational weed is bad. He was for partial-birth abortions, now he's against abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother. He was for taxing the rich and major corporations, now he's against it. In his first few months in office, he came out strong against the media, then he tried to placate them with an address before Congress in which he strove to look and sound "presidential." He endorsed and tried to ram through Congress a repeal of the main substance of the ACA which he had virtually no hand in crafting and which was even more unpopular than he is. The atmosphere of the West Wing might best be described as dismayed paranoia, and multiple respected psychologists (including Howard Gardner) have accused him of narcissism. His twitter feed is one ongoing temper tantrum without beginning or end.

Consequently, the idea that there is a master plan at work here (even assuming he did collude with the Russians to take the White House, which has yet to be proved) rings rather hollow. With how closely the FBI and Congress are looking into his and his associates' connections with the Russians, Trump would have to be not merely delusional and/or narcissistic to continue back-channel communications with them but so utterly divorced from reality that he could not even be as functional as he is.

Ultimately, this is likely just another classic Trumpian move: unplanned and unfocused in the extreme. The only real question on my mind is, "What happens now?"