Introduction

In Part V, I examine variations in decisions to use force in the Trump administration across the crisis in Syria and the escalating 2020 Iranian crisis. The foreign policy goals outlined by President Donald Trump have been markedly different to the post-Cold War presidents that came before him. Throughout the campaign, he had professed an ‘America First’ foreign policy promising to regain American dominance in the world. As a part of this vision, he sought to ‘rebuild’ America's military, renegotiate what he viewed as ‘unfair’ or ‘one-sided’ trade deals, and reassert a unilateral foreign policy, free from multilateral constraints. Yet, upon entering office in January 2017, an actual guide as to how such an ‘America First’ foreign policy might manifest remained unclear. To be fair, this lack of clarity surrounding Trump's foreign policy platform can be attributed, in no small way, to Trump's tendency to self-contradiction. Broadly speaking, however, ‘America First’ could be viewed as a revival of a Jacksonian foreign policy – a renewed yearning for an isolationist-style turn and a revival of American ‘greatness’.

Despite President Trump's somewhat unconventional, almost ‘kaleidoscopic’ statements around his foreign policy (Goldberg, 2017; Kagan, 2018), it is still possible to identify certain variations which do not neatly conform to his ‘America First’ worldview. In fact, there have been instances in which Trump has used force in ways very much counter to this doctrine. In some ways, this variation is more explicit.

In this chapter I show how Trump's decision to bomb Syrian airfields following the chemical weapons attack in Al Shayrat on 4 April 2017 marked a significant departure from his professed ‘America First’ foreign policy. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, I provide a brief background of the developments in the Syrian crisis after the 2013 attack and provide an overview of Trump's ‘America First’ foreign policy. In particular, I show that he would emphasize the need to put America's interests before that of other states, ignoring other states and multilateral treaties if they impeded the US's ability to realize its goals. In this vein, he would argue for the withdrawal of US troops from the Middle East, and, more broadly, from around the globe and focus on specific threats eradicating ISIS.