Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Gauver.

The last few days have been all about Syria.

Our guest this week is Elliot Abrams, who is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

But if things had turned out a little bit differently, he would have been the number two at the State Department under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. That's the job that he wanted. That's a job that he tried to get.

Instead, Trump nixed him. And we talked about that, including the interview for the job in the

Oval Office that he thought he was going to have, but ended up not being quite that. His advice

to other people who, like him, were critical of Trump during the campaign,

are not fully bought in to Trump as president and what they should do when they're thinking about

whether they should seek jobs in the administration. But mostly we talked about Syria.

We talked about the possibility of mission creep. What a success is?

How do you define that?

And what any of this means for trying to figure out what Trump's foreign policy is,

given how quickly he has changed on the issue of Syria itself.

But first, a new thing that we're trying here on the podcast,

we're going to have a rotating group of some of my colleagues of Politico talking through their take on what's going on in the news,

stories that they're working on that relate to what we're talking about with the interview guest each week.

And starting up this week, no better person to talk about Syria than Michael Crowley, who's the senior foreign affairs correspondent for Politico, and has written a lot about this long before there were any missiles that

hit Syria, but also wrote about it in the time since, including talking to some of the former

Obama administration officials like people around John Kerry, who are really supportive, strangely, of what

President Trump did. And I say that strangely, not because it's so strange, it's a consistent

policy view, but because they're having trouble reconciling this in their own minds.

I want to remind everybody to subscribe and rate us on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcast

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