White House walks thin line on support for Syrian regime change

As pressure builds on the Trump administration to articulate a clear strategy for U.S. involvement in Syria, White House officials have attempted to straddle the line between supporting Syrian President Bashar Assad's removal and opposing the commitment of American military forces to his ouster.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Defense Secretary James Mattis, White House press secretary Sean Spicer and other administration officials have each tried their hand at explaining the new U.S. posture toward Syria in the four days since President Trump ordered a missile strike on an airfield controlled by the Assad regime.

Some have struggled to justify Trump's newly aggressive footing in the context of his past insistence that the U.S. should not wander into other countries' conflicts in general, and should avoid the Syrian civil war in particular. The occasionally tongue-tied Spicer opened up a fresh wound for the White House when he invoked Adolf Hitler's use of chemical agents in Nazi concentration camps during an unsuccessful attempt to explain the thinking behind Trump's response to the Assad regime's chemical attack.

Administration officials have consistently argued that Assad does not have a future as the ruler of Syria. But they have expressed vague and sometimes conflicting views on whether the U.S. should play a direct role in his removal and whether regime change has supplanted defeating the Islamic State as America's primary goal in Syria.

"We will continue to push for a political process through which Syrians decide their future," a White House official told the Washington Examiner when asked Tuesday to clarify whether the administration sees military intervention as Assad's path out of power. "We strongly support the talks among Syrians convened by United Nations Special Envoy Staffan DeMistura in Geneva."