With the Syrian missile strike, another old fashioned American streak trumps isolationism

The whiplash about faces of the Trump administration on recent foreign policy positions is a welcome return from isolationism to the more traditional US view on foreign policy. It was difficult to understand how making America great again or putting America first  could be accomplished by Candidate Donald Trump's withdrawing from the world,  weakening alliances, and turning a blind eye to war crimes being committed before our  very eyes.

 In fact, the history of the US is that we have a streak in the American psyche that wants us  to withdraw from control  of the western world's agenda. We  are  plagued  by fatigue of war and  domestic  priorities.  In spite of that,   eventually we get drawn back into engagement when visual evidence of atrocities and terror  happening to others becomes intolerant. It was moral indignation of ethnic cleansing  that led to US and NATO intervention in the Balkans in the 1990's.  The underlying decency of Americans in our sympathy toward others and  a concern about human rights,  however latent, are some of  of the values that indeed make America  great.

What has changed since the rise World War II  is that  cameras were not in Auschwitz and Dachau to bring  atrocities into American living rooms until after   pictures were published  of the camps' emaciated  liberated  survivors.  That pogroms and persecutions of Jews before World War II  were tolerated because  anti Semitism and racial and religious discrimination were shameful values shared by so many in Europe and the US. Moral outrage and  indignation found its formal outlet  in the Nuremberg trials and the  subsequent  using of  the trials as a template to set up War Crimes Tribunals  in the Hague to prosecute those who committed crimes against humanity  In 2016. former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was convicted  of genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and sentenced to 40 years in prison. That may be Bashar al  Assad 's ultimate end,   to face justice in the Tribunals if he survives either a  violent or  a peaceful end to the Syrian conflict. US  Secretary  of State Rex Tillerson yesterday also indicated that Assad should face war crime trials.

 The visual reporting of television and the internet has brought an unprecedented degree of  depiction of pain and suffering into the every day consciousness of human beings, so excessively that gut reaction had been  so numbed by a constant flow of  pictures of dead children and intentionally  targeted and bombed hospitals and schools that wide spread world  indignation was slow to reach a breaking point. It did  reach that point  in Donald Trump 's  TV view one  evening  of a report of a Syrian gas attack. The public support of Trump's missile attack response , whether it was or was not militarily significant, showed that politically the public has his back., that they too had reached the end of any tolerance of atrocities that supported his intervention on moral grounds.  This was a surprise no doubt  to him and others  who had assumed it was .Candidate Trump's outspoken doctrine  against the US ever intervening in conflicts on moral grounds that helped propel him to election victory. .His  core supporters of that policy were  reduced to a whimper in the accolades that followed the missile strike Trump ordered.  The decent streak in America at last  awoke.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tillerson-assad-may-face-war-183940336.html