It’s no accident that the Pentagon launched an unprecedented airstrike against Damascus hours after President Donald Trump removed White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon from the National Security Council, Cornell Clayton, Director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute of Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University, asserted.
The analyst told Radio Sputnik that Bannon’s presence on the council designed to advise the US president on national security and foreign policy matters was “always an anomaly,” adding that his primary task was to “make sure that the NSC was de-operationalized.”
“I suspect that [Bannon’s] anxiousness about being on the council, in the Principals Committee in particular, was to shape the messaging of US foreign policy towards a more nationalist perspective,” Clayton noted, saying this trend has most likely been reversed after the reshuffle. “For instance, we see the strike yesterday in Syria. That’s something [Bannon] would have been very much opposed to. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Bannon was removed and you see that kind of internationalist policy decision being made right after he was removed.”