Syria

Just hours after unleashing a missile strike on Syria, Steven Mnuchin announced that the US will announce sanctions “in the near future” against the Assad regime. 

In the span of just one week, President Trump and his team have pivoted from declaring that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad could stay in power, to launching airstrikes against his regime—and possibly committing the United States to a new military conflict whose scope and scale are unknown.   

Early this morning we reported that as part of its response to the Syrian attack, in addition to suspending communication with U.S. forces designed to stop planes colliding over Syria, the Russian frigate Admiral Grigorovich would be deployed to the Tartus naval base in Syria. The Russian Black Sea Fleet’s frigate The Admiral Grigorovich, currently on a routine voyage, would enter the Mediterranean later on Friday, a military-diplomatic source in Moscow told TASS, adding that the ship would make a stop at the logistics base in Syria’s port of Tartus.

In a statement on Friday morning, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that the US missile strike violated not only international, and added that the attack “was on the brink of military clashes with Russia.”

“Instead of their much-publicized thesis about a joint fight with a common enemy, Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL], the Trump administration has proven that it will fiercely fight against the legal government of Syria,” Medvedev wrote on his Facebook page.

Eleven weeks into his administration, Trump's Syrian airstrikes appear to have achieve what until last night appeared impossible: unite much of Congress in support of a Trump decision.

As Bloomberg report, U.S. lawmakers mostly expressed support for Trump’s strike against a Syrian airfield in response to an alleged chemical weapons attack, though some cautioned that Congress needs to be consulted on a comprehensive strategy if the strike is a harbinger of things to come.