The Bombs the United States Reserves the Right to Plant

An antipersonnel land mine is, in its essentials, a bomb that waits. It may wait for a soldier. It may wait for a farmer. It may wait for a child. It does not know the difference. And unlike a rifle whose trigger is pulled by a human being who can at least see what he is shooting at, a victim-activated antipersonnel mine delegates that decision to pressure, a tripwire or proximity. Once placed, the weapon itself determines who sets it off.

The consequences are often ghastly. A person who steps directly on a buried blast mine may have a foot or leg torn away. The explosion can drive dirt, stones, fragments of clothing, metal and plastic deep into the wound. Other types of antipersonnel mines scatter fragments capable of injuring or killing people nearby. Surgeons experienced in treating mine victims have described such injuries as among the worst produced by conventional weapons.

Land Mines Endure

Land mines have another singular characteristic: they do not know when the war is over.

Mines planted to stop an army can remain after the army has departed, after treaties have been signed, after governments have fallen and after children have been born who were not alive when the conflict occurred. Clearing them is slow, dangerous and expensive. Landmine Monitor recorded 6,279 people killed or injured by mines and other explosive remnants of war during 2024 in 52 countries and areas. Where civilian status was known, 90 percent of the casualties were civilians, and children accounted for almost half of the civilian casualties whose ages were known.

International Outcry Against Land Mines

The international community eventually decided that this was intolerable. The 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on Their Destruction, commonly called the Mine Ban Treaty or Ottawa Convention, requires its members not to use, produce, acquire, stockpile or transfer victim-activated antipersonnel mines. It also requires destruction of stockpiles, clearance of mined areas and assistance to victims.

As of 2026, 162 states are parties to the Convention. That number has recently declined because Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland withdrew in response to their perceived military danger from Russia. Russia itself has never joined. Neither have China, India, Pakistan—or the United States.

America's Schizophrenic Position on Land Mines

The American position is particularly peculiar. The United States helped initiate international efforts toward eliminating antipersonnel mines and participated in the negotiations that produced the Ottawa Convention, but never signed it. American policy has since swung back and forth. President Obama sharply restricted their use. President Trump reversed that policy in 2020. President Biden reversed Trump in 2022, barring American use everywhere except the Korean Peninsula and declaring the ultimate objective of bringing the United States into compliance with the treaty. Then, in late 2024, the Biden administration itself departed from that policy by supplying antipersonnel mines to Ukraine.

In December 2025 the second Trump administration went considerably further. It again removed the geographic restriction on American use of antipersonnel mines and authorized combatant commanders to approve their use. Current policy permits remotely delivered antipersonnel mines equipped with self-destruction and self-deactivation mechanisms.

Semantic Niceties

Calling such weapons “non-persistent” or sometimes “smart” mines does matter: a mine designed to deactivate after a limited period presents less long-term danger than one capable of remaining lethal for decades. But it does not alter the essential characteristic that caused the international community to reject antipersonnel mines. Until it deactivates, the mine is still victim-activated. It cannot distinguish the boot of an enemy soldier from the shoe of a civilian. And the Ottawa Convention therefore prohibits victim-activated antipersonnel mines regardless of whether they incorporate self-destruct or self-deactivation mechanisms.

There is a further irony. The United States has for years spent enormous sums removing mines and other unexploded weapons from other countries. It has been the world's largest donor to humanitarian mine-action programs. Yet in early 2025 American foreign-aid cuts froze or terminated a number of those programs, even while the United States continued to reserve for itself an exemption from the rule it had helped much of the rest of the world observe.

Organizations including the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and its American partners continue to press the United States to renounce antipersonnel mines completely and join the Convention. Advocates have urged Congress to prohibit their deployment and the development, production and acquisition of new antipersonnel mines.

America's Empty Rhetoric

The Trump Administration officially speaks of a campaign against “Radical Left terrorism.” The White House uses precisely those words. It portrays left-wing political violence as an especially grave threat and invokes the protection of innocent people as justification for extraordinary governmental measures against it.

Violence committed for political purposes should indeed be condemned, whether it comes from the left, the right, religious extremists or anyone else. But a government making that argument assumes a peculiar moral posture when it simultaneously refuses to renounce a weapon that most of the nations of the world have agreed is too indiscriminate and too enduring in its consequences to use at all.

The Takeaway

There is no inconsistency in condemning someone who plants a bomb. There is considerable inconsistency in condemning him while insisting upon one's own right to plant one. It is no small irony that this is something RadicalLeft.site needs to explain to the United States of America.