What's Next? 4.10.17
There's a lot going on today: White House in-fighting, Neil Gorsuch being sworn in, Tillerson's heading for Russia - but I'm focusing on doomsday forecasting brought to you by 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles flying over the desert in Syria.
I've been thinking quite a bit about if and how World War III is going to happen. My Scottish manager at the restaurant, in a conversation about what I thought about the Syria strikes, said to me, in a tone maybe a little too casual, "I've always said that I will see a European city nuked in my lifetime. It's going to happen."
"Don't say that," I snapped back.
"It's true, we've forgotton what that looks like. All it'll take is one city, leveled, for the world to remember and wake the fuck up."
Although he is not a foreign policy expert, or even all that interested in foreign affairs, I couldn't help but wonder if maybe he was a little bit right. Did he really think that? Or was he just preparing for the worst? A contrarian with the ultimate Debbie Downer comment?
"Don't say that, that would be horrific," I repeated.
It seems far fetched. Mutually assured destruction right? That's what they keep saying on T.V. It won't get that far, will it?
Look, he has no idea what he's talking about and neither do I, if I'm being honest. But let's think about a few key events from the past week:
We have an erratic president desperate to boost approval numbers - nothing like going to war to get the country to fall behind you. We see this ongoing Syrian civil war, civilians, children, women, innocents being brutally killed and displaced by their own government. We know Obama had his "red line in the sand" that he let Syrian leader Assad cross without recourse when he used chemical weapons back in 2013. But then he did it again last week. And Trump, eager to prove himself as 'not Obama' and 'president action', ordered what pretty much everyone is calling a "proportional and measured response" with little to no civilian casualties, specifically targeted and flawlessly executed.
So that's good right?
Well, many people, including some Democrats are praising the move as a sign to Assad that we mean business and will not tolerate the use of chemical weapons. But now there are questions of legality - did we break international law? What is the official position of the administration (currently murky at best)? And most importantly, what comes next?
War in Syria? Boots on the ground? Or is this headed somewhere bigger than just the Syrian civil war? That's what's been keeping me up at night.
Remember our buddies over in Russia? The ones that meddled in our election? Well, looks like Trump and his buddy Vladmir have hit a rough patch. Why? Well, Putin is aligned with the Assad regime in Syria, and we just took if not a firm but at least implicit stand against that regime, pitting us against Russia, who you may also remember, has nukes.
What do these two incidents have in common? They are both shows of aggression towards two separate nuclear-capable regimes with adversarial relationships with the United States. So again, what's next? Where is this all headed?
Plus, the Trump administration is touting last week as a "great week for President Trump" and our cable-news-obsessed Commander-in-Chief is seeing pundits and politicians from both sides praising his military actions last week. As with a toddler, that kind of positive reinforcement will most likely lead to a repetition of that same behavior in the future. It's an unsettling thought that, like a nightmare-reality show, the man with his finger on the nuclear codes is making decisions life or death decisions, based on the next-day reviews.