President Donald Trump announced Friday night that he ordered the U.S. military to conduct precision missile strikes against the Syrian government, in retaliation for a chemical attack executed against its citizens.

Trump said the air strikes, launched in coalition with Britain and France, were to punish the, Syrian regime for the chemical attack which killed more than 70 people.

In the televised address, the US president said the allies would continue their response until Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, ceased its use of chemical weapons.

Also, Trump said that the U.S.-led coalition’s intent was to “establish a strong deterrent against the production, spread, and use of chemical weapons. Establishing this deterrent is a vital national security interest of the United States.”

America has set challenging goals in Syria. It would be a vast overstatement to say that the recent airstrikes solved the Syrian chemical weapons problem or that the program has even been hamstrung. The Syrian regime is reportedly in the process of importing equipment to support the resumption of an industrial-sized chemical weapons program, in violation of the regime’s commitment to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Moreover, the reality of chemical weapons production means that the regime will be able to reconstitute destroyed elements of its program quite quickly in small, hard to find locations that could easily escape foreign detection.

Many in Washington have expressed doubt that the goals of deterring chemical weapons attacks in Syria, while also taking control of the final pockets of territory controlled by the Islamic State along the Syrian-Iraqi border, can possibly be reconciled with President Donald Trump’s insistence on immediately withdrawing the some 2,000 U.S. troops deployed at a series of small bases in northeastern Syria.