Editorials of The Times

Early in his presidency, Donald Trump knew exactly whom to blame for the chemical weapons used in Syria, and what to do about it. The “heinous” sarin gas attacks by President Bashar Assad on the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017 happened because President Barack Obama “did nothing” to enforce his red line against the banned arms after an attack near Damascus in August 2013, Trump said.

So Trump ordered the launch of 59 cruise missiles against a Syrian airfield where the April chemical attack originated. Invoking the horror of “innocent babies” choked by poison gas, he said military action would “deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”

Only it didn’t.

In the 11 months since then, there have been many such attacks, including at least six this year, which U.S. officials and human rights groups blamed on Assad. Rather than the more lethal sarin agent used in April, recent attacks reportedly have involved chlorine.

The use of poison gas, a war crime under international law, has been integral to Assad’s scorched-earth drive to regain control of the last rebel-held areas near Damascus. By bombing civilians and depriving them of food and medical care, he has killed more than 700 people in the past several weeks, on top of nearly 500,000 killed since the civil war began in 2011.

Trump seems less sure-footed about responding to atrocities in a war that has become even more complex with the Islamic State group degraded. Unlike in April, Trump has said nothing about possible military retaliation. While The Washington Post reported that he has discussed the matter with top national security officials, the Pentagon denies it.

Military action is never a panacea, though, and often the wrong choice. Trump’s attack, not authorized by Congress or the United Nations, wasn’t part of a larger strategy. It raised questions about whether he acted impulsively, was consumed with being the anti-Obama or wanted to fulfill his own vision of “toughness.” The one-off military strikes achieved little, as studies have shown is usually the case, and exponentially more Syrians have been killed with conventional weapons than with chemical weapons.

Obama and Trump both seem to have gotten it wrong, with the first relying too heavily on diplomacy and the second too heavily on force. The credible threat of force can make diplomacy more effective.

At least, in choosing to hold off rather than strike in response to the gas attack, Obama decided instead to work with Russia to get Syria to destroy its chemical weapons. That approach deprived Assad of much of his arsenal, though he hid some of his chemical weapons and probably continued to make more, with supplies from North Korea.

Whatever America’s shortcomings, the real culprits in the slaughter are Assad and Russia, which guaranteed Syrian compliance with the chemical weapons accord. United Nations investigators have linked Russian forces to a possible war crime, airstrikes on a market last year that killed scores of civilians. Russia has been Assad’s major defender, using its veto to shield him from penalties in the U.N. Security Council. In November, its veto ended the mandate of an independent panel the Council set up to prove who is responsible for these horrors.

While United Nations inspectors have found the Islamic State responsible for many attacks, Syria’s government, with a decades-old chemical weapons program, has had the means to produce such weapons in large quantities and deliver them with helicopters and jets over wide areas.

In January, France and 25 other countries began to publicize and impose sanctions on those who help Syria get and use chemical weapons. It can be an important database for prosecuting the culprits, which needs to happen as soon as possible. But it can’t substitute for the Security Council, which, at its most united, has a chance of confronting major world problems. That’s off the table now because of Russia’s obstructionism, including a refusal to enforce even its own call for a cease-fire. The longer the war goes on, the more people die and the more destabilized the region becomes.

Yet Trump remains silent. He has claimed that his close relations with Russia, despite its interference in U.S. politics and other malicious acts, were part of a new approach to work with President Vladimir Putin on national security. There is no evidence this has yielded any benefit. Given the poisoned nature of U.S.-Russian relations, maybe the best Trump can do is to ask Arab leaders who are expected at the White House this month to use their growing leverage with Moscow to push for an end to the carnage. Now.

Women’s progress in the United States has been inextricably tied to the availability of birth control. Landmark Supreme Court decisions in 1965 and 1972 recognizing a constitutional right to contraception made it more likely that women went to college, entered the workforce and found economic stability. That’s all because they were better able to choose when, or whether, to have children.

A 2012 study from the University of Michigan found that by the 1990s, women who had early access to the birth control pill had wage gains of up to 30 percent, compared with older women.

It’s mind-boggling that anyone would want to thwart that progress, especially since women still have so far to go in attaining full equality in the United States. But the Trump administration has signaled it may do just that, in a recent announcement about funding for a major family planning program, Title X.

Since 1970, the federal government has awarded Title X grants to providers of family planning services — including contraception, cervical cancer screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted infections — to help low-income women afford them. It’s a crucial program.

Conservatives — often male ones — like to argue that Title X improperly uses tax dollars to subsidize women’s sex lives, and that some forms of birth control can be obtained inexpensively.

“Back in my days, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives,” the Republican donor Foster Friess said in 2012. “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.”

Leaving aside that potentially procreative sex requires a man’s participation, those conservatives should note that the safest and most effective form of birth control for women might cost considerably more than a bottle of aspirin. The intrauterine device, or IUD — a long-lasting contraceptive method that has a vanishingly low failure rate and is a favorite among women’s health care providers — can cost more than $1,000 out of pocket.

Yet the Trump administration appeared to accept the conservatives’ retrograde thinking with a recent announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs outlining its priorities for awarding Title X grants. Alarmingly, unlike previous funding announcements, the document makes zero reference to contraception. In setting its standards for grants, it disposes of nationally recognized clinical standards, developed with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that have long been guideposts for family planning. Instead, the government says it wants to fund “innovative” services and emphasizes “fertility awareness” approaches, which include the so-called rhythm method. These have long been preferred by the religious right, but are notoriously unreliable.

The announcement also says the government will look to fund programs that involve parents or guardians in minors’ family planning decisions, and get spouses involved, with no mention of privacy. And the announcement suggests that the government wants to promote abstinence until marriage.

This is not a surprise, given who is in charge of the Trump administration’s Title X office — Valerie Huber, a longtime advocate of abstinence-until-marriage education programs, which are generally considered to be less effective than comprehensive efforts. Huber landed that post in January, after the resignation of Teresa Manning, who vocally opposes abortion and contraception. The new funding announcement is in keeping with the Trump administration’s thwarted attempt last year to roll back the mandate in the Affordable Care Act that employer-sponsored health insurance policies cover contraception.

Advocates for women’s health care are angered by this attack on their work.

Clare Coleman, the president and chief executive of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, fears that funds will be taken from providers of birth control and given to groups that promote abstinence, come this fall, when the Title X grants are expected to be announced.

Coleman called the move a “direct assault” on family planning providers and “without a doubt the most deliberate attempt to upend contraceptive access for low-income people” she’s seen from any administration.

The Trump administration may not be advocating that women stock up on aspirin to avoid pregnancy, but its priorities are nearly as backward and unscientific. And that will harm the health and self-determination of women, particularly the most vulnerable among them.