Aftandilian in The Arab Weekly on Trump’s Syria Strategy
Gregory Aftandilian, Lecturer at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent Op-Ed on United States President Donald Trump’s military strategy in Syria and in the fight against the Islamic State.
Aftandilian’s Op-Ed, entitled “Trump Unlikely to Get Mired in Syrian Conflict,” was published in The Arab Weekly on April 23, 2017.
From the text of the article:
US President Donald Trump’s order to strike a Syrian government airbase in response to the regime’s alleged chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians has given him a slight bounce in opinion polls and earned him unusual praise from the Washington foreign policy establishment. However, this strike does not change his overall strategy of concentrating on the Islamic State (ISIS) and avoiding regime change in Syria.
After more than two-and-a-half months of missteps and sagging poll numbers, Trump seems to have found his groove by deciding to bomb the Syrian airbase from where it is believed President Bashar Assad’s forces launched the April 4 chemical attack that killed and wounded many Syrian civilians.
Trump’s decision to fire 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the airbase on April 7 was overkill, to say the least, but he wanted to show in a very graphic way that he was the “anti-Obama.” Trump accused the former president of weak leadership for failing to follow through on his own red line when the Assad regime earlier reportedly used chemical weapons.
Aftandilian spent over 21 years in government service, most recently on Capitol Hill where he was foreign policy adviser to Congressman Chris Van Hollen (2007-2008), professional staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and foreign policy adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes (2000-2004), and foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Edward Kennedy (1999).