Will China send arms to support Russia? That was the possibility that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised at the Munich Security Conference, accusing Beijing of considering doing so. China has officially rejected this claim and, as of last night, so has President Biden. ‘I don’t anticipate a major initiative on the part of China providing weaponry to Russia,’ Biden told ABC, seemingly directly contradicting his right-hand man on foreign policy.

Is this just another case of Sleepy Joe misspeaking, a comment that will have to be walked back by his team in the hours to come? After all, Biden has form. He has previously pledged to defend Taiwan from an invasion, trampling over the so-called ‘strategic ambiguity’ that has characterised the US approach to the islands – only for clearer heads from his foreign policy team to row back the comments later.

And yet, Blinken’s claim always seemed odd. Sure, China’s wolf warriors have wasted little time in criticising the West over the last year, blaming Washington and Kyiv for talking about Ukraine joining Nato which in turn ‘forced’ Putin to invade (the whole narrative has a whiff of ‘look what you made me do’, the go-to excuse of victim-blamers).

But what would China gain from sending arms to Russia? Its interests in the Russian invasion are complex, and Beijing is getting what it wants from sitting on the sidelines. A sustained war keeps cheap Russian gas flowing, drawing Russia into China’s orbit, while keeping western resources in Europe rather than the Taiwan Strait, and allows Beijing to continue trading with the West. All this can and has been achieved without the Chinese government expending any of its military resources.

Of course, I don’t have an inside track into Zhongnanhai, the secretive compound where Beijing’s top leaders live and work, and it’s not that I’ve swallowed China’s 12-point peace plan, released this week (if Xi is really serious about peace, he should bring Putin to the negotiating table – which he won’t). But it’s not clear to me how Beijing’s interests would be served if it were to join a war on another continent, and thereby escalate the conflict closer to the world war level.

So what is this American intelligence that shows China might send arms – and if it’s so concerning, why does the President of the United States not consider it a realistic possibility? Before the Biden interview, the administration had reportedly been considering making the intelligence public, though when asked about this yesterday, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby refused to comment on if and when that would happen.

Throughout this conflict, the US has shrewdly levied intelligence briefings as a tactic of war. Perhaps the President and his Secretary of State are playing good cop bad cop; or perhaps Biden really did misspeak. But whatever the truth, this episode looks less like strategic ambiguity and more like amateurish incoherence.