U.S. strikes Syrian military airfield.

Officials said President Trump authorized 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles to slam into a Syrian airfield to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and damage the Syrian air force, which carried out an attack Tuesday that killed dozens of civilians, including children, in northwestern Syria. It was the deadliest chemical assault on Syrian civilians since 2013.

By Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff  •  Read more » : At least 13 Syrian soldiers and civilians were killed.   The Russian Foreign Ministry called for an immediate meeting of the United Nations Security Council after President Vladi­mir Putin declared the U.S. attack a violation of international law. Russia also said it was pulling out of an agreement meant to minimize the risk of in-flight incidents between U.S. and Russian aircraft operating over Syria. “The Kremlin’s decision to suspend the 2015 memorandum of understanding on the air operations immediately raised tensions in the skies over Syria,”  “Putin’s spokesman said the risk of confrontation between aerial assets of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS and Russia has ‘significantly increased.’” By David Filipov  •  Read more » When Russian President Vladimir Putin got word that U.S. cruise missiles were going to strike his Syrian ally early on Friday morning, he had several options for firing back. He could have used Russia’s air defense systems in Syria to shoot the American rockets out of the sky. As a rebuke to the Americans, he could also have cancelled his meeting next week with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But he did neither. Reading between the lines of Russia’s initial response, at least in the hours following the first targeted U.S. strike against the Syrian military, it seems that Putin is choosing to step back, bide his time and leave plenty of room to smooth things over. In Moscow’s diplomatic circles, there is even hope that Tillerson’s visit on Tuesday could still mark the start of some grand bargain – if not exactly a love affair – between Putin and President Donald Trump.  Acting on Instinct, Trump Upends His Own Foreign Policy By MARK LANDLER President Trump took the greatest risk of his young presidency, putting aside a foreign policy doctrine based on avoiding messy conflicts in distant lands. In doing such a turnabout, Trump perpetuates the notion among his critics that he's amenable to whomever last talked to him, writes The Fix's Aaron Blake: “Arguably his biggest liability was that people — even many supporters — believed he lacked the proper temperament to be president. The prospect of the hotheaded, itchy-Twitter-fingered reality TV star having access to the nuclear codes was an attack ad that practically wrote itself.” “Within the administration, some officials urged immediate action against Assad, warning against what one described as ‘paralysis through analysis.’ But others were concerned about second- and third-order effects,” according to Pentagon reporters Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Thomas Gibbons-Neff. “The attack may put hundreds of American troops now stationed in Syria in greater danger. They are advising local forces in advance of a major assault on the Syrian city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s de facto capital.” A direct confrontation with Russia, even if accidental, is now more likely. This back-and-forth could prompt Trump to recalibrate his position toward Putin, potentially taking a more aggressive posture. The U.S. intervention, on the other, might also make Russia more willing to negotiate a deal to end the civil war and remove Assad. You never know. In Europe, despite their frosty relationships with the new U.S. president, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande backed Trump’s actions. Britain also offered backing but said it would not participate if asked. Hillary Clinton supported a no-fly zone over Syria during the campaign last year, putting her in a more hawkish place than Obama. Speaking in New York yesterday, she called on Trump to take out Assad’s air force. "Assad has an air force, and that air force is the cause of most of these civilian deaths as we have seen over the years and as we saw again in the last few days," the former secretary of said at a "Women in the World" summit, per CNN. "And I really believe that we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them." She added that if she were in power, she would tell Russia they were either “with us or against us” on the no-fly zone. "It is time," she said, "the Russians were afraid of us because we were going to stand up for the rights, the human rights, the dignity and the future of the Syrian people."