The United States, Russia, and Syria’s chemical weapons: a tale of cooperation and its unravelling

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the drivers of US–Russian cooperation in the disarmament of Syria’s declared chemical weapons (CW) in 2013–14, emphasizing the primary importance of credible coercion vis-à-vis the Syrian government. It identifies additional significant drivers—including the resonance of institutional memory of cooperation through the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) programs; continued interest alignment for Russia through consensus on a hybrid disarmament framework; and constructive relationships among senior officials on both sides—while also showing the relevance of Russian sensitivities to status, the prospects of a new round of Syria peace talks planned at the time (“Geneva II”), and expectations of positive “spillover” from narrow cooperation on Syrian CW into other areas of US–Russian relations. The article further traces and explains the unravelling of internal consensus within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on the Syrian CW file between 2014 and the present day, analyzing growing frictions over the Fact-Finding Mission, the Joint Investigative Mechanism, and the Investigation and Identification Team. Disagreements within the OPCW over these issues became increasingly viewed as inextricably linked to the broader geopolitical Russia–West confrontation. Finally, the article probes the resultant implications for prospects of universalizing the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention and making progress toward a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone in the Middle East.