For President Trump, choosing targets and launching cruise missiles to punish the Syrian regime for using chemical weapons this week may have been a relatively clear-cut decision. The big problem is what comes next.

The military had been preparing options for a strike against President Bashar al-Assad since well before 2013, when the Syrian dictator killed more than 1,000 of his own people in a devastating nerve gas attack.

A chemical attack Tuesday blamed on the Assad regime killed scores of civilians and triggered a response from the Pentagon, which launched approximately 50 cruise missiles at a Syrian military airfield late on Thursday.

“The basic questions haven’t changed,” said Phil Gordon, a senior official in the Obama White House who took part in many earlier debates about how to punish Assad. “Is there a set of military strikes that you can use to degrade the Syrians’ ability to deliver chemical weapons and, if you do that, what do they do in response?”

The biggest difference between 2013, when President Barack Obama last threatened airstrikes against Assad, and today is that the risks of widening the conflict are much greater.

Read the whole story from The Washington Post.

Featured image courtesy of ABC News