Over the last 18 months, US President Joe Biden has transferred internationally banned cluster munitions to Ukraine seven times. Cluster munitions disproportionately harm civilians, and most countries rightfully recognize them as unacceptable. By sanctioning their use, the president is complicit in grievous and preventable civilian injury and death. Furthermore, his actions weaken essential norms around the use of cluster munitions, increasing the likelihood of further abuse by others in the future.
History will not remember this unconscionable decision kindly. President Biden should act now to disconnect his legacy from the legacy of cluster munitions.
The 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions bans the use, stockpiling, transfer, and acquisition of cluster munitions. One hundred and twenty-four countries have signed or ratified the Convention, but the US remains outside the global consensus.
Cluster munitions are an internationally banned weapon for good reason. They shower indiscriminate harm on combatants and civilians alike and can lay in wait, unexploded, in farmlands and forests for years to come. These munitions threaten life and limb of anyone plowing fields or rebuilding destroyed infrastructure.
The unexploded cluster bomblets, often shiny and toylike in appearance, also disproportionately attract curious children. Last year, cluster munitions killed or injured at least 219 people worldwide, though the true number is likely far higher — throughout at least 50 attacks in Ukraine alone, the number of the dead and the injured is unknown. Of the total recorded incidents in 2023, children accounted for almost half of all casualties from cluster munition remnants.
Biden Breaks with Predecessors
Biden breaks with his predecessors on cluster munitions. While former President Donald Trump changed US cluster munitions policy in 2017, abandoning a long-standing prohibition against cluster munitions that fail more than 1% of the time, he did not use, or transfer for use, cluster munitions.
Nor did former President Barack Obama before him, outside of a single use in Yemen in December 2009 that neither the US nor the Yemeni government has publicly confirmed US responsibility for. In fact, the last president to sanction the use of cluster munitions was George W. Bush during the Iraqi invasion more than 20 years ago.
Cluster munitions are an internationally banned weapon for good reason.
Biden’s seven transfers of cluster munitions to Ukraine in less than 15 months have contributed to the faulty argument that such weapons have a legitimate role in war today. The resultant erosion of the norm against their use is apparent in Lithuania’s declaration of intent last month to withdraw from the 2008 Convention. Lithuania is the first state, outside of North Korea, to withdraw from a major arms control treaty, a move that Biden’s decisions continue to pave the way for.
In his September 2024 address at the United Nations General Assembly, Biden spoke to the importance of multilateralism, international institutions, and respect for treaties, saying, “There will always be forces that pull our countries apart and the world apart: aggression, extremism, chaos, and cynicism, a desire to retreat from the world and go it alone.”
Biden continued, “Our task, our test, is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than those that are pulling us apart, that the principles of partnership … can withstand the challenges that the center holds once again.”
Weakening Multilateralism
By facilitating the use of cluster munitions in defiance of global norms, Biden weakens the project of multilateralism, and its institutions, including NATO and the United Nations.
When historians write the story of this administration, Biden’s empathy for the Ukrainian people and his steadfastness against Russian imperialist expansionism will be high points. The president’s continued disregard for long-established global norms around the use of cluster munitions threatens to stain such achievements. But this is a stain not yet made permanent. Biden can still redeem his legacy by choosing to align policy with the global consensus.
In his remaining months in office, he must act swiftly to discontinue the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions and swiftly align with the Convention on Cluster Munitions while encouraging partners and allies to do the same. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
