If the US believes it can act outside the confines of international law, then it will do so in other theatres around the world, writes Shannon Ebrahim.
Does President Donald Trump consider the rules-based international order worth preserving? That is probably one of the most vexing questions in international relations today. The US show of force against Syria when it launched 53 Tomahawk missiles at a military air base suggests it feels in no way constrained by the international order which it has upheld since the end of World War II.
This approach would seem to be a serious threat to international peace and security.
Military aggression against another sovereign state is only allowed in international relations following a resolution passed by the UN Security Council, or as an act of self-defence according to Article 51 of the UN Charter.
When the US attacked Syria on April 7, it had no UN mandate to do so and had not been granted approval of the US Congress. Its attack has thus been deemed by many international legal experts as an act of naked aggression.
The fact that children were writhing in pain and dying a slow death from a chemical weapons attack on April 4 certainly called for a robust international response, but it needed to be a collective multilateral response that first fully and independently investigated where the culpability lay for the chemical attack. Russia repeatedly called for such an investigation, which would have examined traces of chemicals remaining in the area, as well as scoured the government air base from which the US claimed the chemical weapons were stored.
To have rushed into a military show of force without first establishing the facts on the ground was in effect military adventurism. Some have suggested that the Trump administration was hoping to divert the attention of the US public away from a series of policy failures such as the unsuccessful Muslim ban, the difficulty in overturning Obamacare, and the almost 300 civilian deaths caused by the recent US bombing of Mosul. Precision strikes against a Syrian government air base in the aftermath of the heart-wrenching chemical attack certainly captured the headlines and diverted attention. US military interventions have always initially rallied Americans around the flag.
There are a number of possibilities that could explain what happened which do not directly implicate the Syrian government in wrongdoing. One would be that the Syrian military bombed a secret depot where chemical weapons were being stored by Islamic State (IS) or other opposition forces. There is ample evidence which has emerged that opposition forces have used chemical weapons on a number of occasions. In Idlib, opposition forces have produced toxic land mines, and used chemical weapons in Aleppo. IS has also used chemical weapons in Iraq against the international coalition and the Iraqi army.
One should remember that the Syrian government had allowed the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to destroy its chemical arsenal, and inspectors had verified the elimination the weapons. If the authorities had used chemical weapons, there would have been traces of the powder on weapons in the area. Even if the Syrian regime did have some hidden chemical weapons, there was no strategic value in President Bashar al-Assad deploying such weapons against civilians and opposition forces in Khan Sheikh knowing it would provoke a robust reaction from the US and the international community.
It would also lead to increased calls within the US administration for al-Assad’s overthrow and insistence that he played no part in the country’s long-term future.
That then begs the question as to whether the chemical weapons attack itself was a provocation, as the Russians have asserted.
The other factor worth considering is whether the US assault was planned in advance of the chemical attack itself. Whether the US pre-planned the attack, or whether it was a knee-jerk reaction to the chemical attack, the end result has been a downward spiral in US-Russian relations. Trump has done a U-turn on Nato, now claiming the alliance is no longer obsolete and approving Nato’s expansion to include Montenegro, provoking fury in Moscow.
Russia continues to insist on an independent probe. It may be too late for that now but what is concerning is there are likely to be more chemical attacks in Syria, and the US is likely to continue playing judge, jury and deliverer of punishment.
Also if the US believes it can act outside the confines of international law and the UN Charter in Syria, then it will do so in other theatres around the world, which is deeply destabilising for us all.
* Shannon Ebrahim is Independent Media's foreign editor.