While President-elect Donald Trump has indicated he intends to shift US military involvement in Syria toward a focus on fighting ISIS, and away from propping up rebel factions to attack the Assad government. This has been a subject of debate among US officials for awhile, with the Pentagon and CIA arguing intensely over who the US should be at war with in Syria.
Top hawks from both parties seem to be trying to undercut Trump’s shift toward fighting ISIS with their latest comments, as former Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright and former Bush National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley getting together to push for a shift toward direct US military attacks against the Syrian government.
The two offered a report which argued that focusing on ISIS was “isolationism,” and that the US needs to prepare to attack Syria outright both to prevent the Assad government from getting control over Aleppo and from retaining control over the nation’s west.
This plan is largely the plan Hillary Clinton ran on in the 2016 election, as she overtly talked about military action even if it meant getting the US in a shooting war with Russia as well. Trump, however, rejected this idea repeatedly, insisting that a war with Russia is not in America’s interest.
Incredibly, Hadley talked to Reuters about the plan, and conceded that it might well make the situation in Syria even worse than it already is, but insisting it was worth a try because “what’s now going on isn’t working.”