President Trump might believe that Vladimir Putin’s assassination of domestic dissidents is a matter for Russia alone. That’s the wrong value understanding for an American president to take. Regardless, Trump has no good excuse for ignoring Putin’s repeated breach of his Chemical Weapons Convention treaty commitments.
I note this in light of Alexey Navalny’s new comments to CBS’s 60 Minutes. A Russian dissident journalist, Navalny was poisoned on Putin’s orders as he traveled in Siberia in August. The weapon used against Navalny was a Novichok-class high concentration nerve agent of the same kind used by Russian spies in Britain in 2018. But speaking to CBS, Navalny pointed out that while European leaders have condemned Putin and promised sanctions, “I have noticed [Trump] didn’t. I think it’s extremely important that everyone … maybe … first of all, [the] president of the United States, to be very again[st] using chemical weapons in the 21st century.”
Navalny is correct. What happened to the journalist isn’t really important in relation to Navalny per se. It’s important for what it says about the adherence of Russia and other nations to a critically important facet of the post-war, U.S.-led international order. That being, the upheld norm against the use of chemical weapons banned under the Chemical Weapons Convention. That principle is important for two reasons.
First, because chemical weapons are particularly brutal and often indiscriminate. Nerve agents of the kind used against Navalny, for example, prevent the brain from communicating with the body’s organs, causing painful suffocation. Or take high concentration chlorine gas exposure, which drowns you as water fills your lungs.
Second, because if a nation is able to make a binding treaty commitment and then repeatedly and unashamedly breach that commitment, it will have little reason not to play games with all its other treaties. This bears relevance in relation to Russia, a Chemical Weapons Convention signatory, which has now been proven to have broken the convention twice in just three years.
This second point bears special importance in relation to Trump.
After all, Trump’s motive for his Navalny silence is likely not, as some would suggest, driven by some kind of Russian compromise material held over the president. Were compromise the case, Trump’s Russia policy would have looked quite different. Instead, I suspect that Trump believes he would jeopardize ongoing U.S.-Russia nuclear arms control talks if he takes action in relation to Navalny’s situation. The problem, however, is that Russia will have great reason to keep playing games with those nuclear talks if Putin senses that he can make commitments he’ll never have to live up to!
It would be one thing, here, if there was doubt as to who was responsible for Navalny’s poisoning. But it’s not as if this is a terribly complicated investigation. The Trump administration knows that Putin is responsible for the assassination attempt. For the sake of international security and the future of diplomacy with Russia, Trump must take action.
