The BBC, like everything else except perhaps the weather, costume dramas, and cookery shows, isn’t very good at analysing foreign policy:

Of course the thing about red lines is that they need to be crystal clear.

Yes, which was exactly the problem with Obama’s use of the term: a “bunch of chemical weapons” indeed.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike this seemed to be the case.

Well, yes: use chemical weapons, get Tomahawks fired at you.

The message was: use nerve gas again and consequences will follow.

That too.

But on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer muddied the waters.

Asked if air attacks with conventional weapons might also draw US punitive action, he said: “If you gas a baby, if you put a barrel bomb into innocent people, you will see a response from this president.”

Barrel bombs, though, tend to be large canisters filled with explosives and shrapnel that are typically dropped by Syrian government forces from helicopters. In other words they are conventional rather than chemical munitions.

So was Mr Spicer broadening the red line? Belatedly the White House had to issue a clarification noting that what he really was saying was that barrel bombs containing chemical weapons would draw a US response.

I think the BBC is reading too much into this: Spicer could have used any terminology. The message is: the Trump administration can and will use military force against those it doesn’t like, in stark contrast to the policies of Barack Obama.

This lack of clarity would not matter quite so much if it was not characteristic of the Trump administration’s whole approach to foreign policy. And the stakes could not be higher.

The stakes are the same as when Obama was in charge, and we didn’t see the BBC running front-page articles about how his policy of dithering, hand-wringing, and backtracking was catastrophic even though it so obviously was.

There seems to be no central guiding brain behind the evolution of the Trump team’s foreign policy. The US president himself has failed to articulate any clear approach.

Which can be both a good and a bad thing. One of the worst aspects of Obama’s foreign policy was his constant flip-flopping and failure to back up his words with actions. This emboldened the likes of Putin and Assad to take steps which they were confident would not result in any serious reaction from the United States. The problem with this was it left the road wide open for a miscalculation, whereby somebody like Putin would either take a step too far or lose control of a situation and America would have no choice but to act, resulting in a war that nobody really wanted. Obama and Kerry also had the habit of immediately telling the world what they were not going to do in the wake of a geopolitical crisis, helpfully crossing off those options they weren’t considering. This only served to embolden America’s enemies further and increase the likelihood of a misstep.

As things stand, Trump’s approach seems to be a lot more sensible: show that he is willing to use force, and willing to use it where Obama wouldn’t, but otherwise keep quiet about what he will or won’t do given any particular situation.

With regard to Syria that may be unsettling. With regard to North Korea, it could be potentially catastrophic.

Sure, it might be better to come up with a concrete, workable policy on issues such as Syria and North Korea  – but this assumes it is possible to arrive at one. North Korea has been an intractable problem since the 1950s and there is no solution that I can see regarding Syria short of keeping well out of it. In the absence of a clear policy, it is probably better that Trump remains unpredictable and keeps America’s enemies guessing. This is far less likely to result in a catastrophe than Obama’s idiotic habit of using empty words, encouraging escalation, crying when it happens, and then doing nothing.