WASHINGTON _ The Trump administration gave mixed messages about its goals in Syria on Sunday, with officials stressing different priorities after of a U.S. airstrike that marked a deepening involvement in the country's conflict.
Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said the departure of Syrian President Bashar Assad is a U.S. priority, just as it was under the Obama administration, and that peace in Syria was probably impossible while he remained in power.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson took a more nuanced view, asserting that Assad had undermined his legitimacy as a leader but declaring that defeating Islamic State remains the top U.S. goal in Syria.
President Donald Trump's long-term intentions in Syria thus remained unclear in the days since 59 Tomahawk missiles fell on a Syrian air base that U.S. officials said was used to launch a poison gas attack last Tuesday that killed about 80 Syrian civilians and injured dozens more.
The retaliatory airstrike was a policy reversal for Trump, who said throughout his campaign that the United States should not involve itself in local conflicts, an isolationist view consistent with his "America first" position.
On Sunday, Tillerson emphasized that the administration considers defeating the Sunni militants of Islamic State the most pressing concern in Syria, not ousting Assad.
"First and foremost, we must defeat ISIS," Tillerson said on CBS's "Face the Nation," using an acronym for Islamic State. Assad's eventual fate, he said, "is something that we will be working (on) with allies and others in the coalition."
That was an apparent shift from his comments to reporters on Thursday night, when he said, "It would seem there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people."
Haley was harsher on CNN's "State of the Union." As long as Assad stays in power, she said, "there's not any sort of option where a political solution is going to happen."
"If you look at his actions, if you look at the situation, it's going to be hard to see a government that's peaceful and stable with Assad," she said.
The U.S. envoy said "regime change is something that we think is going to happen" in Syria, but she stopped short of suggesting Washington would directly seek that outcome.
Taken together, the comments of Haley and Tillerson suggested that senior members of Trump's foreign policy team may be seeking to shape the president's views, with Haley more opposed than Tillerson to Assad remaining in power.
Tillerson's more restrained language may reflect his plan to visit Moscow for meetings this week, at which he hopes to bridge the latest tensions in U.S.-Russia relations.
Russia's government denounced the missile strike as an act of unwarranted aggression, and denied that Assad's forces carried out the attack with the banned nerve gas sarin.
But President Vladimir Putin has not himself the U.S. airstrike, and some reports suggest he is unhappy that Assad has boxed him into defending what many consider a war crime.
