Assad hasn’t used chemical weapons against his own people since Trump ordered those cruise missile strikes in April. The enforcement of the important international prohibition against the use of nerve gas is certainly an achievement for the Trump administration.
A flurry of cruise missile strikes, of course, doesn’t make a Syria strategy, and the precise contours of Trump’s game plan for Syria going forward are not clear — at least not publicly.
What is clear is that ISIS is almost completely defeated in Syria and is largely eliminated from all of its havens in Iraq. The defeat of ISIS has been a long time coming, and most of the anti-ISIS campaign took place under the Obama administration. But the Trump national security team helped to hasten the defeat of ISIS in two ways.
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