Trump Weighs More Robust Military Strike Against Syria

WASHINGTON — President Trump and his advisers on Tuesday weighed a more robust retaliatory strike against Syria than last year’s missile attack, reasoning that only an escalation of force would look credible and possibly serve as a deterrent against further use of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians.

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A pair of Navy warships in the eastern Mediterranean Sea were capable of launching the same sort of missile barrage that Mr. Trump ordered against a Syrian air base a year ago in response to a chemical attack then that killed more than 80 civilians.

But White House and national security officials worried that an operation of the same scale, as punishment for another suspected and deadly attack that killed dozens over the weekend, would not be effective at curbing the Syrian military’s war effort.

Administration officials said they expected any new strike to be more expansive than last year’s, but the question was how much more. Possible options included hitting more than a single target and extending strikes beyond a single day.

But even so, Mr. Trump remained reluctant to deepen American involvement over a longer term.

Mr. Trump and his team enlisted support for action against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. American officials expressed confidence that they would have the backing of France, which has been vocal about the need for a strong response, as well as Britain, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all of which called for Syria to be held accountable for the suspected chemical attack. It remained unclear, however, whether any of the allies would participate.

Mr. Trump canceled a trip to Peru and Colombia that was scheduled to start Friday to oversee the response to the Syria attack, but as of early evening, had made no comment about Syria on Twitter or in his public appearances on Tuesday. Instead, he left it to a guest, the visiting emir of Qatar, to express determination to stop atrocities in Syria.

“We see the suffering of the Syrian people,” Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani said with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. “And me and the president, we see eye to eye that this matter has to stop immediately. We cannot tolerate with a war criminal, we cannot tolerate with someone who killed more than half a million of his own people.”

Mr. Trump spent part of the day huddled with John F. Kelly, his chief of staff, John R. Bolton, his new national security adviser, and other officials. But his spokeswoman declined to discuss the deliberations.

“As we’ve said, all options are on the table,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, “but I’m not going to get ahead of anything the president may or may not do in response to what’s taken place in Syria.”

Heavily backed by Russian air support and Iranian ground forces, Syria is in a different league than adversaries in other places where the United States is at war. Unlike the Islamic State in various parts of the Middle East, the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Shabab in Somalia, the Syrian government has extensive air defense and missile systems capable of shooting down foreign planes.

Sending bombers and fighters jets, with American or French pilots, to strike Syrian airfields or other facilities is considered risky because it could deepen the conflict if a pilot was shot down. That is why the Pentagon is looking at the same sort of retaliation used last year when two Navy destroyers unleashed a fusillade of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Al Shayrat airfield that was believed to have been used to launch chemical attacks.

But less than 24 hours after that strike, Syrian warplanes were again taking off from the damaged airfield, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group. Beyond Al Shayrat base, Syria still had numerous others from which it could launch flights. While Mr. Trump’s advisers argued last year that the strike affected Mr. Assad’s calculations, in the end its limited nature ultimately did not thwart the Syrian government’s ability to launch chemical attacks.

“There’s a tension between the desire to do something bigger than last time and the president’s clear desire not to stay engaged in sustained operations,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, an under secretary of defense under President Barack Obama. “Conceivably, they could design a larger one-off strike or a series of smaller strikes.”

“But at the end of the day, it’s sustained pressure on Assad that’s going to change his calculation about whether to use chemical weapons,” Ms. Flournoy said.

David F. Gordon, policy planning director at the State Department under President George W. Bush, said Mr. Trump was almost certainly looking to punish Mr. Assad more severely while limiting American engagement.

“What they’re probably searching for is: What can we destroy that weakens this guy?” Mr. Gordon said. “He has to do more than he did last time, and I think he does want to disrupt their capabilities. But I think it’s basically still the one shot — it may be in two waves or something, but I don’t think there’s an ongoing response to this.”