Acknowledging the Armenian Genocide

Now, it’s official. The U. S. government has openly acknowledged the Armenian genocide that took place during and following World War I. In an opinion piece at Politico veteran diplomat Daniel Fried provides a pretty good backgrounder:

Why the long delay? Why did the U.S., champion of human rights, resist use of “the g-word” for so long? When I worked on this issue, my colleagues and I knew the facts of the killings. We did not deny that they were genocide. But we did not use genocide to describe them. We used terms like atrocities, mass killings, slaughter, and mass murder. Strong terms all, but not genocide.

There were two reasons why the U.S. took that position. One, long championed in the U.S. government, had to do with relations with Turkey, a staunch NATO ally during the Cold War and after. Turkey regarded any U.S. use of the word genocide as a redline in relations and made clear that using the term would trigger a harsh reaction. Given U.S. interests in relations with Turkey, particularly military and security relations, such Turkish warnings carried weight. Besides, the U.S. had for decades maintained its close alliance with Turkey despite that country’s authoritarian bent, including a pattern of military rule. The U.S. didn’t much like that but had learned to live with it. In that context, putting the bilateral relationship under stress for the sake of recognizing the Armenian Genocide, something some in the U.S. government regarded as a historical dispute, was simply not seen as worth it.

That sort of “realist school” calculation was common in U.S. government thinking for decades. Support for the Greek Colonels regime after 1967, for the authoritarian Shah of Iran, and for Chile’s military rule after 1973, followed that pattern of swallowing hard yet remaining allied with authoritarian countries. Trying to brush away the Armenian Genocide as an irritating distraction that could disrupt otherwise close U.S.-Turkish relations fit that model. It was the norm for U.S.-Turkey policy for many years. These sorts of calculations made a kind of sense at the time. But they often do not look good in retrospect. Hypocrisy has a price.

I and my colleagues in the Bush administration had another, hopefully better, reason for avoiding use of the term Armenian Genocide: we wanted to encourage Turkey to come out of its shell of historical denial and hostility to Armenia; to find its own way to reconcile with Armenia and its own past.

There’s one observation I’d like to make which is how sanitized that account is. From 1916 to 1920 the ethnic Turks exterminated 90% of the Armenians within Turkey’s borders. And it wasn’t just the Ottoman. Much as the extermination of German Jews was part of Hitler’s German nationalist program, the Armenian genocide was part of the nationalist program of the “Young Turks” who ultimately morphed into the Kemalist government that ran Turkey for more than 80 years. Just as China’s present pogrom against its Uyghur population is part of China’s nationalist program.

IMO any hopes that Turkey would “come out of its shell of historical denial” is and always has been a fantasy.

Perhaps the most important aspect of President Biden’s announcement is that it confirms that he’s a not a foreign policy realist if anyone had any doubts. This should raise concerns. Wilsonian idealists have been getting us into trouble for decades. Realists have been no better. Jeffersonian idealists like me believe that cozying up too closely to dictators and religionist governments is corrupting.