I wrote my first response to the U.S. cruise missile attack on Shayrat Air Base on April 7, 2017, at 2:30 p.m. EDT—in other words, about 18 hours after the attack. A great deal more has happened since, and it is in the nature of a crisis that this be so. One of the characteristics that make a crisis a crisis is that decision-makers on all sides enter into a condition of accelerated experience. Time pressure deepens, and uncertainties loom. Emotions roil. Stuff happens in parallel (Washington, Damascus, Moscow, Tehran, elsewhere) that somehow seems to collide, upsetting the normal laws of political physics. This is one reason crises are so accident-prone historically. People do stupid things they probably wouldn’t do in normal times, although in the case of the current President and Secretary of State, one cannot be too confident about that, their experience levels being so very, very low.

What you will see below in italics is my original text of April 7, and interpolations, corrections, and expansions within and around it in this normal text. Before beginning in earnest, we can sum up what we know now, Monday morning, that was not so clear, to me at least, this past Friday afternoon. So the Obama Administration declared a red line concerning the use of chemical weapons and then failed to enforce it, but the Trump Administration did not declare such a red line but enforced it anyway. Which is worse? The former is worse because it trashes U.S. credibility, but the latter is not wonderful either because it confuses everyone, a situation that can be accident-prone as well. But then, just a short time later, Secretary Tillerson, Moscow-bound tomorrow, demanded that the Russian government stop supporting Assad. This amounts to drawing another red line that will not—cannot—be honored except at excessive risk or cost. This was a stupid thing to say, akin to the Soviets or Chinese demanding in 1967 that the U.S. government stop supporting South Vietnam.

That is not all—see below.

By now the world knows that U.S. military forces for the first time since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011 have attacked regime targets. Plenty of the basic facts are known about what transpired about 18 hours ago, but a few important ones are not—at least not in the public domain.

For example, we have only a very general BDA (Bomb Damage Assessment) report. This matters because Tomahawk cruise missiles are very accurate if “lite” weapons. Knowing what the four dozen or so—59 as it turned out—missiles hit and missed, deliberately and otherwise, could tell us a lot about why the President, presumably with Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s guidance and concurrence, chose the lesser of three options presented at what has been described as a meeting of considerable length. That in turn could tell us if the intention ultimately is to coerce the Russians into coercing the Syrians to stop doing monstrous things to their own people, and possibly coercing them to support a compromise political settlement to the war; or if it’s just an Eff-You gesture designed only to relieve the sudden pressure of moral unction that unexpectedly came upon our new Commander-in Chief—who seemed to lurch from coldblooded Randian to Godtalk invoker of the American Civil Religion in the wink of an eye. In other words, knowing more about the target set would tell us whether there is any political strategy attached to the use of force, or not. Probably not.

This question has since been answered, in a most foolish way. The Administration made it clear in public that the attack was a “proportional” one-off, a kind of messaging signal, and would not be repeated if the Syrians now behaved themselves. Even if this is what you intend, saying so is unhelpful, to say the least.

I mentioned Vietnam a moment ago. One of the problems with U.S strategy in that war during the Johnson Administration (Lord knows there were many) is what came to be known as “graduated response.” That was a then-popular game-theoretical term for the use of proportionate military action as a messaging device. Jim Mattis knows this. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought this was terribly clever, very much best and brightest. It wasn’t, and Jim Mattis knows that, too. Graduated response left the initiative in determining the level of violence to the enemy, and in a situation (like Vietnam and Syria) where the balance of interests trumps the balance of power, the local party willing to sustain the most pain in what it considers to be an existential engagement will gain an advantage. So we have ceded advantage in the next move to the Syrians, with their Russian lawyers close at hand.

And sure enough, within 24 hours after the strike we heard news of a Syrian chlorine gas attack in a Damascus suburb called Qaboun. No, this was not sarin, and no this was not dropped from an aircraft, and no this did not murder scores of non-combatants. But it was surely deliberate: This was Bashir al-Assad’s way of saying “Eff-You” back at us and starting a nasty game of finding our threshold for a repeat attack. If he acts now as he has acted many times before, Assad will ratchet up the stakes, looking for the level just below our response trigger. Hence I wrote:

Additionally, we do not know if other U.S. forces are flowing to theater, and which forces they may be—so we don’t know if yesterday evening’s strike was intended to be a one-off or the start of a larger campaign. Careful: It could be both a one-off designed to send a message but not to reshape policy unless some other actor—the Syrian regime, the Russian regime, even the Iranian regime—acts in such a way as to “inspire” further U.S. kinetic exercises. But since that sort of response is entirely possible—most obviously, if Assad uses sarin again and dares us to escalate to stop him, accepting much more risk in the process—we had better be prepared for the move after next if there is one. If we are not preparing, we make that move more likely, and we thus exacerbate the potential vulnerability the strike has set in motion.

Yes, and again: That is why declaring that we were done shooting was an error. I find it perplexing that Secretary Mattis did not prevent that error, since his knowledge of history certainly furnishes all the reasons anyone needs to have avoided it.

Nor, very much related, do we know if Syrian or more likely Russian aircraft or ships have moved toward U.S. Navy forces in the Eastern Mediterranean. That would be normal. Adult militaries scout and monitor each other’s protocols just like serious athletes scout and study their rivals before the game. (In this case, not only U.S., Russian, and perhaps Syrian and Iranian militaries are trying to listen and learn, but so most likely are Israeli and Turkish militaries.)

Less that an hour after I wrote this paragraph, and even before it could be posted, news broke of a Russian missile frigate sailing into the Eastern Mediterranean. OK, so that box got checked in a hurry.

But sometimes monitoring behavior can become aggressive and inspire concerns about fleet defense, for creating an air of uncertainty is often a tempting gaming tactic at a moment like this. But it can backfire if uncertainty produces bravado or panic—which can amount to more or less the same thing. It’s happened before, many times. It would be not so good, for example, if the U.S. Navy were to shoot down a Russian warplane buzzing too close to our intell ship that is sailing along with the USS Ross and the USS Porter. (I don’t know its name, but I’m pretty sure there is one nearby.)

That did not happen, which is good. The Russians are not going to risk World War III over Syria. We were pretty sure of that before, and now we’re surer. The Russians telling us how we’ve harmed U.S.-Russia relations at the start of this Administration is actually a good thing, too. It’s an honor to be disliked by the right kind of people, after all, and now the President knows better what kind of people these guys really are. We avoided Russians and sarin stocks at Al-Shayrat, which means we knew they were there—the Russians and the sarin—which means, more importantly, that we know the Russians know what the Syrians have been doing all along. Tillerson said that the Russians are either “incompetent or complicit” in the CW attacks, but he has to know that it’s the latter. I hope he gets a chance to make that clear in private tomorrow in Moscow. If he leaves in a huff, that would not be so bad either, because it isn’t easy to come up with a list of potential U.S.-Russian areas of cooperation that are both significant and likely to go forward as long as Vladimir Putin needs a conflictual relationship with the West to maintain his grip on power.

Now think what this means in a broader sense. If the Putin regime thought it was doing itself a big favor by trying to get Trump elected, it now needs to rethink that. I doubt that the Russians though he would win, so that they did not think their normal electoral-interference shenanigans would make a difference. Just goes to show that other governments do stupid things, too. And while hardly anyone agrees with me, I still think that the Russian government’s over-the-top reaction to the Navalny-inspired protests of recent days was inspired by its huge fear of a genuine populist movement such as the ones Trump and Le Pen represent—and the Russians gave her party money, too!

Meanwhile, on our side of the fence, there is a chance now that the President will rethink what the Russians have been up to in Ukraine and elsewhere, and maybe even what NATO is still good for. There is a tendency for political and geostrategic novices to say all sorts of idiotic things about subjects they don’t really understand, and then once they are forced to understand them the idiocy mostly goes away. This has happened many times before. I liken this to pouring all sorts of stuff into the top of a funnel, but only a little, far more predictable, stuff comes out the bottom: This is the funnel as a metaphor for how reality shapes on-the-job-training thinking. Lots of U.S. foreign policy has been bending back to the mean, for good or ill, since January 20—although a certain amount of damage has already been done.

There is plenty more we don’t yet know, but of an entirely different order. Most of us remember the bizarre sequence of events back in 2013 when, after a Syrian regime chemical weapons attack on unarmed civilians President Obama prepared a strike and then backed off, allowing the Russians to fish him out of the drink with a false promise about ridding Syria of all its chemical munitions. The Syrian declaration was false, the Russians knew it was false (for the Soviets had supplied most of the stuff and the expertise regarding how to use it, and were aware of what the Syrians really had by way of chemical precursors and weapons), and they made a safe bet that an avariciously political but very rise-averse Obama Administration would be willing to take the declaration at face value so as to crow about its own success.

The process to get there, recall, was truly wild: The decision system worked perfectly until the President changed his mind about whether to go to Congress after a garden walk with one of his political aides, not consulting his Secretaries of State and Defense and wrongfooting both the former and his own National Security Advisor as they were about to make speeches supporting the military strikes. Until the sarin settled over Khan Sheikhoun on Tuesday, some of Obama’s staunchest defenders were still claiming that all of Syria’s chemical arsenal had been removed without a shot being fired, completely oblivious to the logic and mounting evidence that they had in fact been snookered.

Remember all that? Well, how does what has now happened in this new Administration differ? Note that just a few days before the Khan Sheikhoun attack, both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley had said that dealing with Bashar al-Assad and his merry band of mass murderers was “not a priority.” So, hearing that, Assad thinks, reasonably enough, “Well, I can do what I like now,” and the Russians say “amen.” So Assad proceeds to terrorize a corner of Idlib province, the obvious next regime target after the fall of Aleppo. The aim? Same as before: ethnically cleanse to the extent possible a stronghold of Sunni Arabs and send them into refugee columns headed ultimately for Europe, the better to serve a host of Russian interests in the process.

But then suddenly the Americans do a volte-face: They change their minds and attack with cruise missiles. They must have realized in Damascus just how the North Koreans felt in June 1950, just weeks after Dean Acheson drew his infamous line putting South Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter for mainland Asia: They take high U.S. officials at their word, only to find that our word won’t stand against the first rush of righteous indignation we summon.

That’s not all. Apparently, if one can believe the news, the President worked mainly through General Mattis and, one supposed, General McMaster because he’s just down the hall. It’s not clear if Secretary Tillerson knew about the decision until after it was taken. We apparently warned the Russians to stay clear though the deconfliction channel before the strike, and with Tillerson headed off to Moscow in a few days one would think he would have been part of that judgment. But it’s not at all clear that he was.

Well, thanks to some sharp and believable reporting in the New York Times, we now have a better assessment of the decision process. There is good news and other news in it. Tillerson was in on the process, but whether he was an active or inert ingredient in the recipe that led to the strike remains unclear. The other problem is that, while the Deputies Committee convened properly, created options, which then went to the NSC or the Principals Committee (that’s how things are supposed to work), some of these meetings were by secure telecom methods. The President was either aboard Air Force One or in Florida, and most of the rest of the NSC was in Washington. This is better than not using the process at all, but telecom methods almost always lose something in translation—body language, paralinguistic cues, and more. It often means that the people who are physically near the President have more sway with their advice than those far away—which is another reason why overuse of the “Florida White House” is such a bad idea.

So what is one to make of an Administration that seems just as prone to monkey-in-the-machine-room process antics as its predecessor, and that also chose the least risky option under the circumstances?

Yes, there is a difference between old and new Administrations—of course. Trump acted quickly; Obama deliberated over such matters endlessly. Trump comes across more like Henry IV, Obama more like Hamlet, if you like a Shakespearean metaphor. And the circumstances have changed: This second time around with Assad and his chemicals there was really no way to duck a reckoning. As many have pointed out—both Democrats who rued Obama’s passivity in the past as well as Republican supporters of Trump right now—if the U.S. government had again failed to act in the face a raw violation of international norms and treaty obligations, then the message to bad actors everywhere would have been, in essence, “Do as you please to anyone you please to do it to, because no one in the civilized world will lift a finger to stop you.”

I still on balance concur with the decision to strike, but that’s because there is a history here that even a new Administration simply cannot ignore. We needed to restore some confidence in U.S. verve. We have allies as well as adversaries, and they need to know that the superpower they rely on en extremis will protect its clients, or all sorts of nasty things can happen that will ultimately affect us. That’s why it’s called an “order.” That’s why when Senator Paul criticized the strike saying that the Syrians “did not attack the U.S.,” he sounded just as foolish as he is.

That said, as long as there is no political purpose attached to the use of force it looks to others like the United States is still acting as a cross between a self-appointed global policeman and the mother-in-law of the world, lecturing others about their supposed moral frailties. If the situation with the attack on Khan Sheikhoun had been historically virginal, a good case could have been made for not using force. Had that been the case, I would not criticize Senator Paul by name. But it wasn’t so I am.

As things stand, however, the Administration chose the least aggressive, most risk-averse military option put before it, so it not clear how loud and strong a message it has sent. That is why a new cycle of taunt and bitchslap may ensue, with unpredictable consequences. But what were the other two options the President heard from his military advisers?

Yes, see above. So was this strike a pinprick or not? I’d say so, yes. The strike did not hit a major Syrian operational center, and it did not destroy more than a quarter of the capacity of al-Shayrat Air Base. It did not, as noted, attack the sarin stocks, because we did not want to create a lethal cloud that could have killed thousands of people instead of, reportedly, just 15. So, again noting earlier comments, what we did may indeed commence a dialectic of taunt and bitchslap, but under conditions that either cede initiative to the Syrians or that needs to run risks of breaking that pattern. Ah, but those other options? Not so attractive, for reasons former President Obama well understands.

I don’t know, of course, nor does anyone not privy to the discussions. But I can guess. One, now favored aloud by Senators McCain and Graham, would be to smash the Syrian Air Force in its entirety, so that no more attacks of the sort we saw this past Tuesday can again be mounted. That would force the Russians to do these kinds of crimes directly, something they may not be willing to do; if they were willing, it would add mass murder to their well-practiced mendacity, which would at the least have a clarifying purpose, not least in the President’s own peculiar head.

But to achieve that aim would require aircraft, not cruise missiles. We would have to suppress Syrian air defenses first to do that, and we might find the deconflict channel with the Russians not nearly clear enough to avoid direct engagement with them. That would really get us into a war, slippery slope and all, and possibly not just with the Syrians in Syria. That sort of thing could touch off, say, little hybrid Russian-speaking green men crossing into Latvia or Estonia, stunning a disheveled NATO with a choice it is now very ill-suited to make.

But we’re not going to be able to coerce the bad actors here into compromise, if not submission, with anything less than much more skin in the game. So again, looking at the current diplomatic void, we confront the problem of connecting military action to political objectives that are both desirable and achievable. As it has been from the start, that is very hard to do in Syria, and it may not be worth the risk now that the risk is considerably greater than it was in 2013.

And this is why Syria has always been a hard case that has only gotten harder over time. I do think President Obama is guilty of some misjudgments erring on the side of both safety and passivity, but I never claimed before and I don’t claim now that he was in anyway derelict in his duty as Commander-in-Chief. This has always been hard—a 51-49 percent kind of deal. And that same degree of difficulty is what led the Trump Administration to do the least it felt it could do: Use standoff weapons to “degrade” but not destroy the ability of the Syrian regime to repeat its war crimes.

Many have asserted since Friday that if we want to drive the Syrian cauldron toward a political settlement, we have to torque the battlefield situation in a way to make that necessary. How? And so the old nostrums come back: Arm the Syrian opposition, create no-fly zones, and all the rest. And with the nostrums come all the reasons why these options are hard (or impossible) to do, and may well incur costs not worth the potential payoffs. Syria is still hard, and having a new Administration in Washington changes that not one iota.

The uppermost violent option may have been essentially regime decapitation. We have bombs, called Moabs (follow-ons to the Daisy Cutters of old), just one of which can incinerate several square blocks of downtown Damascus—most of the regime’s political and military elite with it—quicker than you can say “pass the humus.” But then we create a vacuum that would probably change the civil but not end it. ISIS is no longer in a position to easily fill such a vacuum, but it is not clear who could or would, the non-salafi rebels being still, after all these years, far from a unified political (or military) force. Creating massive state failure by decapitating the Alawi regime would beg some outside power to intervene to suffocate the next pulse of violence, minister to the needy, rebuild governance structures of some kind, and babysit the whole arrangement for many years until it could stand on its own. There are no candidates able and willing to do that as far as I can see, and General Mattis knows this well even if Donald Trump does (or did) not.

I don’t know if this third “big” option is the one the press reports indicate was discarded early on, leaving the planning to flesh out just two options. But I think it was. There is always a “too big” option presented by the military planners in order to make the “middle” option seem more attractive (in this case “too big” involves a lot of lawyers telling everyone that we could not cause that many civilian casualties, even if it would have the effect of saving civilian lives in the longer run). It’s the same logic that leads retailers to price some items very, very high so that buyers will create a psychological excuse for themselves to purchase the next least expensive—but still pretty expensive—item. Works often, but not this time.

Hence, option 1: Shayrat air base, and (hopefully) let’s go home. Well, we’ll soon see about that.

Amen. Yes we will.

A fair bit has been made already about the signaling significance of the strikes against Syria on China and North Korea, as well as other interested parties in East Asia. Some even suppose that a main reason for the strike was to persuade China to coerce North Korea, in its own enlightened self-interest, so that we won’t have to coerce North Korea with very muscular kinetics ourselves a few months down the road. Breaking the news of the strike to the Chinese leader over dinner down in Florida struck some observers as worthy of Don Corleone himself.

This is a bit much. Yes, a real test of American statecraft is at hand, and so may be a real test of the U.S. military: No U.S. Administration can let the loonies in Pyongyang deploy a nuclear weapons arsenal capable of attacking the U.S. mainland, and they’re getting too damned close. (Some would say, and have said, we should have forced a showdown much earlier, before the North Koreans could credible menace Japan and thus weaken U.S.-Japanese ties.) So a signal of resolve can’t hurt.

But choosing the mildest of one’s options also can’t help very much. You cannot bag big game with a pea-shooter—it’s really as basic as that. Besides, the U.S. government has been down this road before with China, trying to solve North Korea via the dynamics of the Sino-American relationship. We tried it, for example, in 2005 around this same time of the year. I know; I was there. It was clever and logical—and it didn’t work. Maybe it’ll work this time, with a different Chinese leadership and a more advanced North Korean threat to everyone. But if it does or doesn’t, this jab to Syria will not make a big difference one way or the other.

Finally for now, a wider observation that may elide on our future. A first crisis in an Administration’s life—which this approaches—is a shaping event. It shapes personal and process relationships, and it shapes in particular the inner confidence (or lack thereof) of the President. With this President, no one knows exactly what this might mean, for this President has less experience of governing and geopolitics than any President in American history. We are extraordinarily fortunate, therefore, that next to the most encyclopedically ignorant and temperamentally unsuited President ever to enter the Oval Office are two of the best-suited aides—Generals Mattis and McMaster—one can think of. Both of them know the political limits of the use of force, and the dangers of sloppy thinking applied thereto.

When I say fortunate, I really mean it. It is not too hard to imagine a situation—like one from just a few weeks ago, in fact—in which a Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor and a Steve Bannon still sitting on the National Security Council would push a novice President, now full of himself with a delusional sense of heroic boldness, into doing really dangerous things. This remains a potential problem even with McMaster and Mattis in place, but still, one almost wants to thank Bashar al-Assad that he waited a few weeks before committing his latest war crime.

I have little to add to this text except to note that, from this experience, we have at least learned that the President has a heart. That was not entirely clear before. But his heart was evoked by what used to be called “the CNN effect”—the emotional change one gets from pictures. This is indeed the television presidency. And it is still not a good thing for the Commander-in-Chief to be influenced overly much, as clearly seems to be the case, by what he sees on television, especially in a case where there is no habit of deep reading to mitigate the emotional floods thus unleashed. Hence I stand by even more firmly my earlier conclusion:

Everyone smiles when Otto von Bismarck’s old saw about God protecting drunks, fools, and the United States of America is hauled out. It’s just a joke, just a bit of semi-literary wit and harmless humor, right? Or is it?