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International Affairs 93: 5 (2017) 1013–1037; doi: 10.1093/ia/iix161 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. 2017. This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the US. The pace of events in the first six months of the Trump presidency proved dazzling. One day, 6 April 2017, illustrates the point. During any recent presidential administration, either the decision of the US Senate to change its historic rules about the selection of a Supreme Court justice or the visit of China’s Premier, Xi Jinping, would have dominated the US media for days. But on that day both these events were usurped in coverage when US Navy destroyers in the Mediterranean fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shayrat airfield in western Homs province in Syria, in retaliation for the Assad government’s use of chemical weapons in an attack in Khan Sheikhoun earlier that week.1 What followed was the predictable new round of speculation: did this episode reveal whether President Donald Trump had developed a ‘doctrine’ or—more expansively—a ‘grand strategy’, even in his administration’s infancy?2 Speculation about Trump’s possible grand strategy has been rife not just since he took office but before he was inaugurated.3 Micah Zenko and Rebecca Friedman Lissner declared that Trump had no grand strategy—before his inauguration.4