The painful image of the dead child sparked pleas for the world — including the United States — to do more for Syrian families trying to flee to nations where they might find freedom or safety. The Syrian refugee crisis presented an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate its global leadership — by working with our allies in the region (for example, Saudi Arabia), with foreign aid, and also by example — by increasing our then-paltry numbers of Syrian refugees that we accepted here. That’s the response you’d expect from a nation that once defined our exceptionalism as our willingness to accept the world’s “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.”

But presidential front-runner Donald Trump had other ideas in late 2015 — ideas to make America a less kinder and less gentler place. He cited a terrorist attack in San Bernardino as a rallying cry to ban all Muslim arrivals — including Syrian refugees — “until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” and then he routinely bludgeoned Hillary Clinton for supporting an increase in refugee resettlement. In 2016, the final year of the Obama administration, the U.S. managed to exceed its modestly increased goals for accepting Syrian refugees, bringing the number up from next-to-nothing to 12,587. But that all came crashing to a halt the moment Donald Trump took the presidential oath on Jan. 20, 2017, bringing an immediate slowdown to refugee resettlement and a travel ban that targeted Syria and other majority-Muslim nations. Trump had promised this on the campaign trail about Syrian refugees: “If I win, they’re going back” — and in this case, he’s been true to his word.

Two numbers really stand out from Trump’s “Mission Accomplished” missile strike (in alliance with France and the United Kingdom) this weekend. The first is 105 — the number of cruise missiles  fired at Syrian targets on Friday night, an arsenal that has a total cost of roughly $200 million. The other number is 11 — the grand total  of Syrian refugees that America has accepted so far in 2018. In other words, the number of missiles we fired into Syria because of our concern for their suffering people is nearly 10x the number of people we’re willing to offer safe harbor in the United States.

They say that when you’re a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail. When you’re the most militaristic nation in the modern world (by far), then, every foreign-affairs crisis looks like the bull’s-eye of an infrared missile target. As the great writer Charlie Pierce put it  simply this weekend, “We are a war-making people … from our armchairs and recliners, we love the boom-boom.” Trump and his Pentagon again proved our penchant for showing America’s resoluteness by lighting up the night sky with bombs — dating back at least as far as Vietnam — while actually accomplishing next to nothing.

You probably remember that the U.S. targeted Syria with 59 cruise missiles just one year ago (the night Trump “became president,” some pundits bizarrely claimed) while changing neither the course of the civil war nor degrading the butcher Assad’s capacity to wage chemical warfare. Sending twice as many missiles this time around is kind of like talking twice as loud to a foreigner who doesn’t understand English. Friday’s attack was just the latest in a never-ending cycle of American war-making in the Middle East where we push back old enemies while constantly making new ones.

But attacking the Assad regime is particularly troublesome because even the dubious rationale the U.S. uses to launch drone strikes around a wide swath of the world from Africa to South Asia doesn’t hold any water here. There is no legal authority to wage war on the Syrian government without approval from Congress … period, full stop. But this is America in the 21st century, led by a president with an autocrat’s unchallenged power to launch military attacks in the name of a nation that shuns diplomacy and patient strategies in favor of the instant gratification of firing Tomahawks.