MOSCOW—The American airstrike on the Shayrat air base in Syria didn’t do all that much. A day and 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles later, Bashar al-Assad was still in power, his planes were still taking off from Shayrat, still flying and still dropping bombs and killing people in the same areas of Idlib Province where a sarin gas attack killed over 80 people last week. What strike did do, though, was radically alter the power dynamic between Moscow and Washington that Vladimir Putin had spent the last three years establishing: one in which Putin acts and Washington, gobsmacked, scrambles to react.But …read more
Source: The Atlantic
