Zeeshan Aleem:”It appears that President Trump just blocked his own administration’s plan to sanction Russia.
Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, announced Sunday that the Trump administration would hit Russia with new sanctions on Monday over its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program in the wake of the April 7 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, that killed dozens of people. The sanctions were explicitly focused on Russian companies that deal in equipment linked to Assad’s chemical weapons program.
But just a day later, the White House backtracked, with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that the administration was merely ‘considering additional sanctions on Russia’ and that ‘a decision will be made in the near future.'”
“Two things are obvious: The administration is once again botching the rollout of a fairly straightforward policy, and Trump is personally taking steps to ensure that he doesn’t anger Russian President Vladimir Putin.”