What do Donald Trump's pyrotechnics in Syria tell us about US strategy under a new president?
The US missile attack on Syria's Al-Shayrat air base was a tactic, but is it part of an overarching plan or just an isolated convulsion?
"Tactics without strategy" according to the ancient Chinese clan published under the name Sun Tzu "is the noise before defeat".
There is one clear policy element to the strike. It reinstates an important tenet that Barack Obama had thrown away.
As Trump put it: "It is in the vital national security interests of the US to prevent the spread and use of chemical weapons."
Obama was so timorous, and post-Bush America so traumatised, that he allowed Syria to get away with gassing its citizens to death on a mass scale.
Obama said that the use of chemical weapons by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was a "red line", but he crossed it and there were no consequences. So he kept doing it.
Preventing the spread and use of chemical weapons is important. The US has now asserted itself as the enforcer of chemical weapons prohibition.
But while it's important, it's very limited policy. And even if Trump intends this to be the only aim of the missile strike, his administration has more work to do, urgently.
The very day after the Syria strike, reports emerged that the Syrian regime was using chlorine gas, in barrel bombs dropped from helicopters, on rebel-held areas.
If these prove true, Assad still has not learnt his lesson. Will Trump follow through?
Officials in his administration have variously said that the attack was a "one-off" and that "we are prepared to do more" to prevent further chemical attacks.
For any clarity, US action will have to answer. Inaction will be just as telling.
As for policy beyond chemical weapons, leaders in the US congress are asking Trump to explain. To now, Trump has been clear that his only objective in Syria was to defeat Daesh, so-called Islamic State, by joining forces with Assad and his sponsor, Russia. Does Trump have a new Syria policy now?
Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was explicit in a TV interview on the weekend: "I think the President was very clear in his message to the American people, that this strike was related solely to the most recent, horrific use of chemical weapons," he told America's ABC.
There was otherwise "no change" in US posture.
So the attack is not part of a new policy to deal with the Syrian dictator or the Syrian war. Or is it?
The US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, directly contradicted Tillerson in another interview on the weekend.
"So there's multiple priorities," she told CNN. "Getting Assad out is not the only priority. And so what we're trying to do is obviously defeat ISIS. Secondly, we don't see a peaceful Syria with Assad in there. Thirdly, get the Iranian influence out, and then, finally, move towards a political solution, because at the end of the day, this is a complicated situation."
This would mark a dramatic change.
The US would move from bystander to central actor.
And this is a moment of possibility. Trump could use this opportunity to craft an international policy to end a war that has killed half a million people, nurtured Daesh, created 11 million refugees and driven Europe into a deep political crisis.
Only Trump can decide whether it's a sweeping change or a limited one, a strategy or merely a tactic.
Until he does, US allies, including Australia, are best advised to avoid making any new Middle East commitments.