He continued: “White House speech writers must have written the lines that Barack Obama spoke… announcing the U.N. deal in which the Syrian regime agreed to give up its chemical weapons stockpile… In other words, the Trump administration watched a violation of Obama’s 2013 deal, and enforced it in precisely the manner that Obama had implied, which is why virtually every major Obama foreign policy official, from Hillary Clinton to Thomas Donilon to Leon Panetta to David Petraeus, has supported thhe Trump administration’s action.”

“Two senior Obama officials I spoke with told me that were Barack Obama still president, he would have likely ordered a strike that was similar if not identical in scope. Presumably, those former speechwriters would then have used different words to describe the same strikes,” Zakaria quipped.