Just how incoherent can one administration be? At times, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris appear to compete for the incoherence championship. While the VP babbles about the passage of time, the president offers a more structured incoherence in his completely contradictory foreign policy.

At the same time that Biden wants to use Vladimir Putin as a guarantor for Iranian compliance on non-proliferation, he’s publicly warning that the Russian tyrant might start dropping chemical weapons on Ukrainians:

Ukraine’s military warned the public on Tuesday of more indiscriminate Russian shelling from bogged-down Russian troops, and U.S. President Joe Biden issued his strongest warning yet that Russia is considering using chemical weapons. …

Russian forces were expected to continue to attack critical infrastructure with “high-precision weapons and indiscriminate munitions”, Ukraine’s armed forces said in a statement.

Russia has been saying in recent weeks that Ukraine might possess chemical or biological weapons. Biden said those accusations were not merely false, but a sign that President Vladimir Putin might be planning to use such weapons himself.

“Now he’s talking about new false flags he’s setting up including, asserting that we in America have biological as well as chemical weapons in Europe, simply not true,” Biden said at a business event on Monday. “They are also suggesting that Ukraine has biological and chemical weapons in Ukraine. That’s a clear sign he’s considering using both of those.”

Bear in mind that the Russian Federation joined the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 from its inception; Russian is one of the compact’s core languages, and Russia sits on the executive council of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). Moscow received $2 billion from the US and its allies by 2004 to destroy its chemical weapons programs and convert its facilities to civilian use. We spent at least ten times that amount on doing the same to our own chemical weapons infrastructure.

We know that the Russians have violated this agreement all along. Their use of nerve gas in political assassinations alone makes this obvious. Biden’s making it clear that he knows Russia and Putin are not complying with their treaty obligations to the OPCW, and treaties have a lot more legal weight than the “executive agreement” that Biden wants in a return to the JCPOA.

And yet, at the same time Biden’s making it clear that Putin doesn’t give a damn about compliance with treaties, he and Robert Malley propose to use Russia as a guarantor of Iranian compliance with a nuclear deal. Why should we trust Putin in that role when we can’t trust him not to use chemical weapons on fellow Slavs? Especially when the deal will allow Putin to evade sanctions while openly selling Iran its nuclear technology in exchange for the hard currency to which the deal would grant Iran access, hard currency that Putin desperately needs?

Yet you can bet after Putin starts deploying chemical munitions in Ukraine as his client Bashar Assad did in Syria, we’ll still hear from administration officials about the positive role Putin can still play on climate change, just as John Kerry whined after the invasion started. This goes beyond idiocy and even incoherence. It’s sheer madness.