According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, high-ranking American officials are considering a policy of trying to drive a wedge between Russia and Bashar al-Assad, hoping that they can then, with the cooperation of Vladimir Putin, impose a peace on Syria somewhat favorable to U.S. interests. Max Boot is skeptical:

Given that Assad himself is a longtime ally of Russia and provides it with military bases in the Middle East, and that [Assad’s closest ally], Iran, is a big and growing customer of the Russian arms industry, it is hard to know what would induce Putin to do a volte-face. Certainly Barack Obama was never able to bribe Putin into supporting the American agenda, even by delaying a planned missile-defense system for Eastern Europe.

Perhaps Trump will up the ante by offering to lift all sanctions and de-facto abandon Ukraine (and possibly other Eastern European states?) to Putin’s tender mercies. Nothing is impossible, but even if that were not immoral it would still be impractical. There is scant point in bribing Russia to abandon Syria now that its intervention has already decisively tilted the battlefield in Assad’s favor. Even if Russia pulled back now, Assad would remain in a position to stay in power and continue his reign of mass murder. Iran, for its part, is getting wealthy from selling oil, and if Russia doesn’t sell it arms, China will. The Iranian threat will hardly disappear no matter what Russia does.

The administration has also talked of creating “safe zones” in Syria so that refugees can come home. . . . But Obama previously tried to implement a version of this scheme in northern Syria and it accomplished nothing for the simple reason that there were no troops on the ground that could actually protect the safe zone. . . . Is the U.S. going to commit its own ground troops for what is essentially a humanitarian intervention devoid of any obvious “exit strategy”?

Given President Trump’s “America First” philosophy, that sounds doubtful. Instead, Trump appears bent on making common cause with Russia to fight Islamic State—the very excuse that Russia already uses to justify its terror bombing of [Syrian] civilians.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.