Trump should get tough again on chemical weapons states

The media has largely ignored a disturbing trend: Russia is openly using chemical weapons against Ukraine. Ukraine’s army support services say Russia has carried out 4,800 chemical attacks against its troops since Russian President Vladimir Putin‘s invasion. Kyiv has counted a resulting 3 deaths and 2,000 hospitalizations.

Moscow is not the only culprit increasingly turning to nonconventional weaponry: Iran, Syria, China, North Korea, and Burma all possess chemical weapons programs. The United States has failed to effectively deter, counter, and penalize chemical weapons development and use. The incoming Trump administration must prioritize new penalties against states that dare violate the global antichemical weapons norm.

In April 2024, the State Department reported Russia was attacking Ukrainian troops with gas grenades containing riot-control agents, which are banned under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention for use in warfare and cause debilitating physical symptoms. In May, the department determined Moscow was adding to grenades containing RCAs, a chemical agent that causes choking, chloropicrin. In September, the international chemical weapons watchdog, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, gathered forensic evidence confirming the presence of RCAs on Ukraine’s front lines.

Moscow famously used the lethal chemical nerve agent Novichok in brazen 2018 and 2020 assassination attempts against Sergei Skripal, a Russian double agent to the United Kingdom, and Alexei Navalny, Putin’s key political challenger until his death in a Russian prison in February 2024. However, while Russia’s chemical weapons use garners periodic U.S. and European sanctions against key individuals and entities, they amount to a slap on the wrist and have failed to deter Moscow.

Russia’s impunity no doubt inspires further chemical weapons development by Iran, a junior member of a growing Russia-China-Iran-North Korea axis of aggressors. The State Department and the nongovernmental Institute for Science and International Security report that Tehran is developing not only RCAs, like Russia, but also pharmaceutical-based agents, such as fentanyl and medetomidine, that can kill or severely incapacitate enemies during warfare or attack.

Israel is concerned, given Iran’s support for attacks by terrorist proxies, including Hamas’s atrocities against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that Tehran might provide PBAs to terrorists to launch further assaults against the Jewish state. Elsewhere in the region, Bashar Assad’s now-defunct Syrian regime used chemical weapons repeatedly against its own people between 2012 and 2019, at times with Russian support. While Israel likely eliminated the bulk of the Assad regime’s remaining chemical weapons cache in Syria in December, the OPCW has yet to verify their eradication.

China’s military, for its part, is reportedly researching PBAs such as fentanyl, as well as toxins and animal venoms. In Malaysia in 2017, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered the assassination of his half-brother using the nerve agent VX. Unfortunately, successive U.S. administrations have mistakenly believed that token sanctions against chemical weapons attacks and chemical weapons development would salvage a badly eroding antichemical weapons norm.

The first Trump administration took several positive steps to bolster the norm by releasing more intelligence about chemical weapons violators, enacting stronger sanctions against Syria and Russia, conducting air strikes on Syrian chemical weapons facilities, and pushing for the suspension of Damascus’s OPCW voting rights and ability to hold office.

A second Trump administration should go further.

The team should announce a new policy to enact targeted financial sanctions against states that develop and use chemical weapons. In practice, this means the U.S. would freeze assets held by financial institutions that transact with foreign chemical weapons-related entities and individuals and would restrict those institutions from accessing the U.S. financial system. Executive Order 13382, already on the books since 2005, authorizes the president to sanction weapons of mass destruction proliferators and supporters and block related property and transactions, but a new executive order specific to chemical weapons could help.

In addition, while Russia, Iran, China, Syria, and Burma — but not North Korea — are party to the CWC, which bans the stockpiling, development, and use of chemical weapons, these states have actively flouted their obligations while weakening the convention and organization to which they claim to adhere. Moreover, the OPCW’s 193 member states have also failed to rigorously utilize OPCW inspections and enforcement mechanisms.

The Trump administration must address this problem. At the OPCW, the Trump team should pursue the suspension of the OPCW voting rights and ability to hold office of any state found to be in violation of its CWC obligations. To that end, the administration may need to share currently classified information about chemical weapons violations with the OPCW secretariat and member states, which can then vote to authorize OPCW investigations and seek suspension of states’ voting rights and privileges.

The norm against chemical weapons hangs by a thread, undermined by the usual anti-American suspects. President-elect Donald Trump and his team have a new opportunity to save it.

Andrea Stricker is a research fellow and deputy director of the Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on X @StrickerNonpro. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy based in Washington, D.C.