Events

On April 4 2017, 74 people were killed in a chemical weapons strike on the town of Khan Shaykhun in Syria. U.S. President Donald J. Trump authorised a major military strike in retaliation: 59 Tomahawk missiles aimed against a Syrian airbase. This talk analyses Trump’s rhetoric in justifying this response. The paper argues that Trump strategically exploited our inherent disgust and revulsion of chemical weapons – conceptualised as the ‘chemical weapons taboo’ – to validate his foreign policy and gain support from both domestic and international actors. More specifically, Trump employed a plurality of contradictory narratives in order to make his case. Consequently, this paper explores not only the ways in which international norms can be rhetorically manipulated to build persuasive rhetoric (where the current debate on the chemical weapons has ignored the calculated ways in which actors talk about the taboo), but also considers political actors’ capacity to maintain directly conflicting ideas as part of a wider narrative.