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VOL. CLXVI . . . . No. 57,562
SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017
© 2017 The New York Times Company
Printed in Chicago
$6.00
U.S. Strike on Syria Fuels
Uncertainty on the Ground
In Brutal War Short on Solutions, Action
Doesn’t Ease Weight of Suffering
By KARAM SHOUMALI
and BEN HUBBARD
OZAN KOSE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
A boy peering out from a bus carrying Syrian victims of a chemical attack after treatment at a Turkish hospital on Friday.
Boom or Bust:
Partisan Divide
Over Economy
NEWS ANALYSIS
Trump Doctrine: Don’t Follow Doctrine
By PETER BAKER
Shift in How Americans
View Hard Numbers
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Economics has a foundation in
hard numbers — employment, inflation, spending — that has largely allowed it to sidestep the competing partisan narratives that
have afflicted American politics
and culture.
But not anymore. Since Donald
J. Trump’s victory in November,
consumer sentiment has diverged
in an unprecedented way, with Republicans convinced that a boom
is at hand, and Democrats foreseeing an imminent recession.
“We’ve never recorded this before,” said Richard Curtin, who directs the University of Michigan’s
monthly survey of consumer sentiment. Although the outlook has
occasionally varied by political
party since the survey began in
1946, “the partisan divide has
never had as large an impact on
consumers’ economic expectations,” he said.
At the same time, familiar economic data points have become
Rorschach tests. That was evident
after the government’s monthly
jobs report on Friday; Republicans’ talking points centered on a
10-year low in the unemployment
rate, while Democrats focused on
a sharp decline in job creation.
“I find it stunning, to be honest.
It’s unreal,” said Michael R.
Strain, director of economic policy
studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “Things that were less
politicized in the past, like how
you feel about the economy, have
become more politicized now.”
Indeed, the night-and-day
views underscore yet another
front on which Americans remain
polarized five months after the
election, and with President
Trump nearing his 100th day in office.
There are some tangible reasons for the split. Many Republican states, including the Midwestern swing states that provided Mr.
Trump’s margin of victory, have
experienced a more sluggish recovery over the last eight years —
Continued on Page 17
WASHINGTON — As he confronted a series of international
challenges from the Middle East
to Asia last week, President
Trump made certain that nothing
was certain about his foreign
policy. To the extent that a
Trump Doctrine is emerging, it
seems to be this: don’t get roped
in by doctrine.
In a week in which he hosted
foreign heads of state and
U.S. Response to Syria
Upends Prior Stance
launched a cruise missile strike
against Syria’s government, Mr.
Trump dispensed with his own
dogma and forced other world
leaders to re-examine their assumptions about how the United
States will lead in this new era.
He demonstrated a highly impro-
visational and situational approach that could inject a risky
unpredictability into relations
with potential antagonists, but
also opened the door to a more
traditional American engagement with the world that eases
allies’ fears.
As a private citizen and candidate, Mr. Trump spent years
arguing that Syria’s civil war was
not America’s problem, that
Russia should be a friend, and
Continued on Page 14
ISTANBUL — Six years of war
in Syria have ravaged the life of
Ebrahim Abbas, 27.
Mr. Abbas, a computer technician, was detained for protesting
against the Syrian government,
besieged in his hometown, shot in
the stomach, and watched his
brother die in a shelling attack. He
escaped, but his father, a diabetic,
died later from a lack of medicine,
and his mother was killed by a
sniper.
It was from his refuge in Turkey
that Mr. Abbas heard about President Trump’s decision to launch
59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air
base to punish President Bashar
al-Assad for a chemical weapons
attack. It felt good.
“Watching a world power
taking revenge for civilians
against the Syrian regime gave
me a surge of hope and made me a
bit optimistic,” Mr. Abbas said.
But the attack will not bring
back all that he has lost. In a measure of how entrenched the war is,
there were new airstrikes on Saturday on the town targeted in the
chemical-weapons attack, with at
least one person killed, according
to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The strike on the air base was
the most direct, deliberate military intervention by the United
States against Mr. Assad’s forces
since the war began. Mr. Trump
said he had launched the strikes
because he was moved by images
of women and children choking on
poison gas.
“That was a horrible, horrible
thing,” he told reporters the day
after the attack. “And I’ve been
watching it and seeing it, and it
Ebrahim Abbas recovering in
a makeshift hospital in Syria
after being shot in the stomach by a sniper in July 2015.
doesn’t get any worse than that.”
But while the strikes on Thursday appeared designed to limit
the chances of retaliation, Mr.
Trump has offered no proposals to
end the war or to assuage the vast
human suffering it has generated,
dispatching
fleeing
Syrians
across the globe.
The number affected by the
conflict boggles the mind. What
began as an uprising in 2011 escalated into a civil war as protesters
took up arms to respond to the
government’s repression and to
seek its ouster.
Over time, countries like the
United States, Turkey and Saudi
Arabia backed the rebels, while
Russia and Iran helped Mr. Assad.
As chaos spread, extremist
groups gained ground. Al Qaeda
infiltrated the rebel movement,
while the jihadists of the Islamic
State seized territory that extended into Iraq.
Now more than 400,000 people
have been killed, a figure roughly
Continued on Page 14
VISIBLE, VOCAL DIPLOMAT Nikki R. Haley, a former governor, has
seized a role as an outspoken United Nations ambassador. PAGE 12
GOODBYE, MAR-A-LAGO After China’s president left the U.S., its state-
run media denounced the American missile strike on Syria. PAGE 13
Share PTA Aid? Some Parents
Would Rather Split Up District
By DANA GOLDSTEIN
JOSH HANER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
In the Pearl River Delta, breakneck development is colliding with the effects of climate change.
Rising China Waters Imperil a World of Progress
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
and JOSH HANER
GUANGZHOU, China — The rains brought torrents, pouring into basements and malls, the water
swiftly rising a foot and a half.
The city of Dongguan, a manufacturing center
here in the world’s most dynamic industrial region,
was hit especially hard by the downpour in May
2014. More than 100 factories and shops were inundated. Water climbed knee-high in 20 minutes, wiping out inventory for dozens of businesses.
Next door in Guangzhou, an ancient, mammoth
port city of 13 million, helicopters and a fleet of 80
boats had to be sent to rescue trapped residents.
Tens of thousands lost their homes, and 53 square
miles of nearby farmland were ruined. The cost of
repairs topped $100 million.
CHANGING CLIMATE, CHANGING CITIES
The Costs of Inaction
Chen Rongbo, who lived in the city, saw the flood
coming. He tried to scramble to safety on the second
floor of his house, carrying his 6-year-old granddaughter. He slipped. The flood swept both of them
away.
Flooding has been a plague for centuries in
southern China’s Pearl River Delta. So even the
rains that May, the worst in the area in years, soon
drifted from the headlines. People complained and
made jokes on social media about wading through
streets that had become canals and riding on halfsubmerged buses through lakes that used to be
Continued on Page 10
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Of
all the inequalities between rich
and poor public schools, one of the
more glaring divides is PTA fundraising, which in schools with
well-heeled parents can generate
hundreds of thousands of dollars a
year or more.
Several years ago, the Santa
Monica-Malibu school board
came up with a solution: Pool
most donations from across the
district and distribute them
equally to all the schools.
This has paid big benefits to the
needier schools in this wealthy
district, like the Edison Language
Academy in Santa Monica, where
half the children qualify for free or
reduced-price lunch. The campus
is decorated with psychedelic
paintings of civil rights icons such
as Cesar Chavez and the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr., the work
of the school’s art teacher, Martha
Ramirez Oropeza, whose salary is
paid by the pooled contributions.
That money has also funded the
school’s choral program, teacher
aides, a science lab and a telescope.
The funding program is considered a national model, and has
many enthusiastic supporters.
But for some locals it is a sore
point that has helped fuel a longsimmering secession movement
in which Malibu — more solidly affluent than Santa Monica — would
create its own district, allowing it
to keep all of its donations in its
own schools.
Craig Foster, a school board
member from Malibu who favors
separation, said parents volunContinued on Page 18
JENNA SCHOENEFELD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
In Malibu, Calif., Charli Clark
and Stephen Smith in a dance
program with pooled funding.
INTERNATIONAL 4-15
SUNDAY BUSINESS
SUNDAY STYLES
THE MAGAZINE
SUNDAY REVIEW
Feeling Let Down in Myanmar
She Runs a $26 Billion Fund
Getting to ZZZ With $$$
CNN’s Identity Under Trump
Nicholas Kristof
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s efforts to quell
Myanmar’s ethnic fighting have faltered in her first year as the country’s
leader, disappointing many.
PAGE 6
The men on the trading floor once bet
on how long Dawn Fitzpatrick would
last. The investor George Soros just
hired her to manage his billions. PAGE 1
Sleepless in Seattle or anywhere? Not
healthy. Deep slumber is the coveted
state and a big business, with gadgets,
apps, gizmos and classes.
PAGE 1
Jonathan Mahler looks inside the
strange symbiosis between Jeff Zucker,
the cable network’s leader, and the
president he helped create.
U(DF47D3)W+#!,!_!#!_
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