Late Monday night, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, issued
a terse statement—sent to reporters via e-mail—warning Syria that U.S.
intelligence had detected preparations for the use of chemical weapons,
which “would likely result in mass murder of civilians, including
innocent children.” If President Bashar al-Assad follows through, the
statement threatened, the United States would insure that “he and his
military will pay a heavy price.” Nikki Haley, the Ambassador to the
United Nations, tweeted an even wider warning. “Any further attacks done
to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia &
Iran who support him killing his own people,” she wrote.

Putting three rival governments on notice of potential confrontation in
an e-mail from a press secretary and a tweet was unconventional and, in
diplomatic circles, borderline bizarre. President Obama issued his “red
line” to the Assad regime from the White House lectern while the Bush
Administration dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N.
Security Council to present its (erroneous) case that Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This time, the
statements surprised U.S. officials who are normally in the loop. And it
directly contradicted President Trump’s repeated vow not to telegraph
what he intends to do militarily to America’s enemies. Envoys of close
allies told me that their governments were neither informed of the
statements nor consulted.

Even more important, the Administration has not addressed the danger
that a proxy war for influence over prime Middle East property could
soon become much riskier. Tensions are escalating dangerously in the
skies over Syria at a time of deepening uncertainty over whether the
Trump Administration has defined a long-term strategy—and at a time when
little diplomacy through normal channels seems to be involved.

“We’re lost,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of
Oklahoma, told me. “We don’t know what we’re doing.”

For six years, the Obama Administration deliberately limited U.S.
intervention in the multiple conflicts playing out on Syrian
battlefields. It stayed on the sidelines of the bigger civil war between
dissident militias and the Assad regime, providing small-scale arms and
training to the few pro-Western rebels—an initiative that has since
atrophied. U.S. intervention expanded with the rise of ISIS, in 2014,
but again with a limited mandate: defeating the extremist movement.
Thousands of air strikes and the hundreds of Special Forces soldiers on
the ground avoided engagement with the forces of Assad or those of his
allies, namely Russia and Iran.

Since April, however, President Trump has widened the scope of U.S.
intervention, both in terms of its targets and its message. Its first
strike on Syria—fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles fired at an airbase used by
Assad’s warplanes to drop chemical weapons on civilians—marked a turning
point. The strike initially appeared to be a one-off. No longer.

So far, tensions are playing out in the air. On June 18th, the
U.S. shot down
a Syrian warplane, the first direct confrontation between the two countries since 1983, when Syria shot down two U.S. warplanes flying over Lebanon. This time, the roles were reversed. A U.S. Navy fighter downed a Syrian jet shortly after it bombed a U.S.-backed militia, which was fighting to retake the ISIS capital of Raqqa. Syria called the attack “flagrant aggression” reflecting “the evil intentions” of the United States.

The U.S. also shot down two large
Iranian-made drones flying over Syria, on June 8th and June 20th. The armed, Shaheed-129 model drones were flying near the southern outpost at al-Tanf, near the Jordanian border, where U.S. and British advisers are supporting a Syrian militia fighting ISIS. Pentagon officials do not know whether Iranian or Syrian officers operated the drones, but Iran has dispatched thousands of forces and advisers to prop up the Assad regime.
After the downing of the drones, the Russian Foreign Ministry charged the
United States with “open complicity with terrorists.”

En route to Germany on Monday, James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense,
acknowledged the problems of conflicting air forces, armies, and agendas
as U.S.-backed forces (backed up by U.S. Special Forces) move deeper
into Syria to defeat ISIS. “You have to play this thing very carefully,”
he told reporters. “The closer we get, the more complex it gets.”

In its threat to strike Syria again, the Trump Administration was
clearly trying to preëmpt Assad’s use of sarin gas, a colorless and
tasteless nerve agent that leads to convulsions, paralysis, respiratory
failure, and death. In April, dozens died and hundreds were injured when bombs loaded with sarin were dropped in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, in
the rebel-held northern Idlib Province. Since the civil war began, in 2011, the Syrian government has used various chemical weapons a dozen times, according to a time line by
the Arms Control Association.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday that it had seen movement of personnel and
equipment over the past two weeks at Al Shayrat, the same airbase where
the chemical-weapons attack strike had been launched in April. “These
activities are similar to what we observed prior to the regime chemical-weapons attack against Khan Sheikhoun,” Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway told me.

But, five months into his Presidency, Trump has done little to clarify
his Administration’s strategy in Syria—and to explain how it is
different from the Obama policy that Trump so harshly condemned as a
candidate. Diplomats and foreign-policy analysts pointed out that Monday
night’s e-mail statement from the White House sounded much like the
language Obama used in drawing a “red line” on the Syrian government’s
use of chemical weapons. The main difference is that Obama opted for
diplomacy after both Congress and the British government balked at
resolutions endorsing possible military action. Trump made little effort
to cultivate either before acting.

The confrontational tenor of the latest U.S. warning was dismissed in
Damascus, where the media showed a video of President Assad climbing
into the cockpit of a SU-35 fighter jet at a western airfield used by
Russia. He was accompanied on a tour of the base by the Russian Army’s
chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov. A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry
Peskov, said that Washington’s warning was “unacceptable”; Iran’s
foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted that it was based on a
“fake pretext.”

The various conflicts inside Syria now look like “a scramble to grab
land” that pits a flailing government, hundreds of disparate militias, a
handful of disproportionately powerful extremist groups, regional
governments, and international powers against each other, according to
Joshua Landis. Much of the action is now focussed on eastern Syria and
along the Euphrates River Valley, as well as in northern Idlib
Province—where an Al Qaeda offshoot is most active—and the south, where
the uprising began in 2011. Pity Syria.