Cluster bombs for Ukraine highlight US aversion to international treaties

President Joe Biden’s decision to supply Ukraine with ammunition of a type banned by 111 countries under a binding treaty raised a question rarely raised in debates over American foreign policy: why did the United States fail to join this accord and a string of other key international treaties? 

The US is not a signatory of the ban on land mines either, nor on the statute of the International Criminal Court, nor on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Washington signed but never ratified the Arms Trade Treaty which aims to halt the illicit trade of conventional arms.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a key pact agreed upon by 177 countries, never entered into force because the United States and seven other countries have not ratified it.

Lesser known global pacts from which the US stays away include one on persistent organic pollutants,  one on biological diversity and one on the elimination of discrimination of women.

But back to cluster bombs. Dropped from aircraft or fired from artillery, these munitions open up in mid-air and release hundreds of bomblets over an area up to the size of several football fields. Anybody within the area hit by a cluster strike, civilian or military, is likely to be killed or injured. But the problem that rallied more than 100 countries to ban the weapons goes beyond the immediate strike.

Many of the small bombs released in a cluster strike fail to explode but can be set off years or even decades later. Exhibit A for delayed lethality is Laos. There, people – often children – still die or get wounded by handling or stepping on unexploded bomblets 50 years after the United States rained more than two million tons of ordnance on the country between 1964 and 1973 during the Vietnam War. 

ALSO READ| What are cluster bombs which US is set to provide to Ukraine? Why is it facing opposition?

And in Iraq, where the US used cluster munitions from 2003 to 2006,  there are still reports of children being wounded by playing with unexploded bomblets.

The decision to supply Ukraine with cluster ammunition drew criticism from human rights organisations and even close US allies, including Canada, Britain, Spain, Germany and France UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres also spoke out against the transfer.

It ran counter to a US law that prohibits the production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a “dud” rate of more than one per cent. “Dud” refers to bomblets that fail to explode during a strike but remain a hazard for years or decades as is still happening in Laos and Iraq.

The dud rate of the shells shipped to Ukraine, drawn from a huge American arsenal of outdated cluster munitions, considerably exceeds the one-per cent limit, according to Pentagon officials. But President Joe Biden circumvented the export prohibition under a clause in the Foreign Assistance Act that allows exceptions in cases deemed vital to US national security.

Biden holds that a Ukrainian defeat would threaten not only American national security but that of the entire Western alliance.  

The military logic of what Biden has described as a “difficult decision”  is difficult to fault. Cluster munition is very effective. Ukraine is running out of the standard 155mm artillery it uses against the Russian invaders. Neither the US nor NATO countries can replenish the Ukrainian arsenal fast enough. 

But the US has vast stockpiles of old cluster munition with a higher “dud’ rate than one percent and Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin described the supplies as a stop-gap until Western arms factories can produce non-cluster rounds in sufficient quantity. That will take time. Ukraine is estimated to use more than 8,000 shells a day. US factories have been producing 14,000 rounds per month. 

Let’s return to the question of why the United States has stayed outside so many international treaties, including the convention on cluster bombs. It is not the lone holdout – others are Russia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, Israel and China. Russia has been using cluster bombs since the beginning of its invasion of Ukraine in February last year.

There is a difference. What makes the absence of the United States from key international treaties remarkable is its leading role after the Second World War in establishing what is often called “the rules-based international order.”

Washington drove the creation of international institutions centred on the United Nations, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. A huge commitment, through the Marshal Plan, to European recovery after the devastation of World War II helped Washington knit together a network of alliances.

That helps explain the deeply-held belief of many Americans that their country is a model for others to follow, a country suited for global leadership whose actions are evidence of moral authority.

That self-image came through loud and clear when the US National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, was questioned about criticism of the cluster aid package from a number of Congressional Democrats. “Our moral authority has not derived from being a signatory to the Convention Against Cluster Munitions,”  he told a television interviewer. “We are not (a signatory), we have not been, at any point since that convention came into effect…and the idea that providing Ukraine with a weapon in order for them to be able to defend their homeland, protect their civilians, is somehow a challenge to our moral authority — I find questionable.”

Note that while Sullivan stressed that the United States was not a signatory of the treaty he did not explain why it was not. 

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)

WATCH WION LIVE