Washington: The playbook is back

It was striking, in U.S. media coverage of Donald Trump's first hundred days in office, that most observers noted with relief that his foreign policy has turned out to be less radical than they feared. In fact, it's not radical at all. He has already fired cruise missiles at a Middle Eastern country, a ritual that has been observed by every American president since Bill Clinton.

The old Donald Trump was an "isolationist" who opposed U.S. military intervention overseas unless U.S. interests were directly threatened. When it seemed likely in 2013 that President Barack Obama would attack the Syrian regime over its alleged use of poison gas on civilians, Trump tweeted: "The only reason President Obama wants to attack Syria is to save face over his very dumb RED LINE statement. Do NOT attack Syria, fix U.S.A."

And lo! Obama did not attack Syria after all, although it had crossed the "red line" he had drawn in a statement the previous year.

On sober second thought - and after being warned by James Clapper, his director of National Intelligence, that the evidence suggesting that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's regime was responsible for the gas attack, while robust, was not a "slam dunk" - Obama decided not to launch cruise missiles at Syria. (Curiously, there was no Trump tweet praising Obama and taking credit for his change of mind.)

This was the moment when Obama broke decisively with the foreign policy orthodoxy in Washington, and the think-tank "experts" and the reigning media pundits never forgave him for it. Toward the end of his second term, he explained his decision to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, in the following terms.

"There's a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow....