risk 2

When I put up a picture of the Risk board a couple of days ago, I didn't expect things to escalate quite so quickly, but the world is getting ready for a Nato/US/Russia face-off in the already war-ravaged Syria. My map shows in blue the 90 km road route between the two biggest Syrian air bases.

Syrian ruler Assad and his cohort have much blood on their hands with unlawful attacks by both Syrian government and Russia forces against civilians, with attacks on medical facilities, schools, and mosques. There have been cluster munition attacks by Syrian government forces against opposition-held areas as well as use of thermite incendiary weapons. Add continued use of chemical weapons and organophosphorus nerve agents. Then there's been sarin dropped from a Sukhoi SU-22 plane and helicopters dropping chlorine. All with huge civilian casualties. That's the Human Rights Watch picture, but the UN has been stymied to even write a report on all of this by Russian downvoting.

Now the so-called US leader has jumped in making pronouncements about action. His speeches continue to be full of double-talk. One minute he is saying he wants to withdraw American troops. His soundtrack wasn't about atrocities, more that the sphere of influence is away from US strategic interests. Now he's talking about a military strike.

He did the same around a year ago, when he suddenly attacked Shayrat airfield. I know he's just allocated over half the US budget to military spending, but he's already diverting part of that spending to domestic border control.

Trump continues to act erratically. He has other distractions related to 'alleged' sleaze, corruption, vote rigging, payoffs. Even the Trump Tower fire illustrated that his company built this luxury tower block without any upper floor sprinklers. He issued a duck'n'dive DontheCon tweet about that too.

So now we see him hinting at strong-arm retaliation. I've used a particular version of an ISW map to illustrate some of the lines.

But for Trump it's about symbolism. Gesture politics. He can make some good headlines, even if they are against what he has said only a few days and weeks and months ago about this situation.

Syria has around 20 airforce bases. They've also taken to spreading their planes around the desert to make them harder to hit, when on the ground. My satellite picture over one of their main airstrips indicates the situation. Four decoys in a row and four real planes sprinkled around the sand.

Russia has sold and operationalised its S-400 missile system within Syria too. They are ground to air systems that can supposedly track 35 airborne targets and fire missiles at Mach 3.

So far they've not been deployed but if there's a hint of air traffic from Rammstein or other big US airforce conurbations then I'd expect that to all kick off as well.

The UK is being encouraged to take part in whatever happens. RAF Akrotiri is a few minutes Mach 2 airspace away and has Tornado bombers and Typhoon fighters. But with Trump at the front of all this it is potentially a case of Ready, Fire, Aim.