If there was ever any doubt that U.S. President Donald Trump's strike against Syria was also intended to send a message to Pyongyang, the deployment this weekend of a carrier strike group toward the Korean Peninsula should have cleared it up.
There is now a strange symmetry to the two principal foreign policy crises the Trump administration is confronting: the civil war in Syria and North Korea's growing nuclear weapons program. Each bisects Washington's relations with its two primary geopolitical rivals, Russia and China. And neither offers an easy solution.
Washington would like North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Syria's Bashar Assad gone. It believes North Korea's nuclear ambitions risk a regional conflict, while Syria's ongoing civil war is destabilizing the Middle East and providing havens for militant groups such as the Islamic State.