Strategic Ambiguity: Biden and Chemical Warfare in Ukraine

Chemical weapons are considered an obscene aggression; more specifically, these armaments are considered taboo. Should chemical warfare occur then the violation must be countered with a significant condemnation which reflects the pariah nature of the act – per United States (US) President Barack Obama’s infamous redline on chemical weapons use in Syria. With this normative expectation in mind, this paper analyses the US foreign reply to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s alleged chemical warfare strategy within the Ukraine conflict. America has vehemently asserted that Russian chemical weapons use would incite a reaction and US President Joe Biden has repeatedly threatened ‘severe consequences’ in retaliation. Biden has failed to specify what these ‘severe consequences’ entail. Yet the president’s vagueness is identified here as the entire point of his presidential response to the crisis. Failing to communicate clear penalties is presented here not a merely case of normative uncertainty or simply not knowing what to do, but a deliberate foreign policy method centred on strategic ambiguity. Biden’s intentional refusal to outline a detailed response provides a means of a) deterring Putin from chemical violence and b) keeping future options open should deterrence fail, not least vis-a-vis Biden’s eschewal of military intervention in relation to Ukraine. The analysis is based on a discursive analysis of US presidential rhetoric on Ukraine taken primarily from the Compilation of Presidential Documents archive as well as media sources. The paper further considers how far this presidential response to crisis is shaped by the chemical weapons taboo; and the extent to which presidents are constrained in their response to crisis by norms more generally. The paper explores the concept of epistemic ambiguity to analyse the extent to which norms shape the presidential capacity to be strategic/ambiguous at times of crisis. In doing so, the paper compares Biden’s strategic ambiguity to Obama’s previous strategy on Syria. The Biden administration has constructed strategic ambiguity as an alternative to the type of redline policy which proved controversial for Obama. The paper uses epistemic ambiguity to question whether the two strategies are not in fact the same and that Biden puts himself at risk of the same pressure to act decisively as experienced by Obama if deterrence of Putin fails. Will strategic ambiguity ultimately force Biden to engage in the foreign policy options that this very approach was designed to circumvent?