He notes that as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Turkey, he was privy to the months of debate the former president entertained on the question of whether or not to finally label a “genocide” the atrocities committed against the Armenians.
“As vice president, Biden was there to see how these endless and repetitive debates on everything under the sun by all the top policy makers consumed so much time and attention yet often resolved nothing,” he says. “So Biden wants to avoid that by moving some of the small stuff off the table so he can prioritize what he’s decided really matters.”
And Ambassador Jeffrey says he saw a similar motivation behind some of President Trump’s Middle East actions. “Recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but also what he decided about the Golan Heights and the Western Sahara – these are all things that we debated about constantly even though we knew what the reality was.”
After announcing his Jerusalem decision with great fanfare in December 2017, Mr. Trump went on to recognize the occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory in 2019. Then just before leaving office, he recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara territory.
Still, for some experts the human rights overtones of the Armenian genocide question were at least as important as other motivations Mr. Biden might have had.
Having placed human rights at the center of his foreign policy – and having already deemed China’s treatment of its minority Uyghur population “genocide” – Mr. Biden seemed unlikely to follow in the footsteps of several past presidents who as candidates had promised to describe the World War I-era atrocities against Armenians as genocide, only to back down once in office.
Indeed for some foreign policy experts, the president’s action was at least as much about China as it was about Turkey.
“Yes, Biden was sending a signal to Erdoğan about his anti-democratic actions and growing human rights abuses, but it was also a signal to Russia and what Putin is doing, and perhaps most important of all, to China about its treatment of the Uyghurs,” says Matthew Schmidt, associate professor of national security and political science at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.
“In the case of Turkey, Biden is recognizing a century-old genocide, but in China’s case it’s an active genocide happening before our very eyes,” he adds. “So the more important aspect of calling out the Armenian genocide is not really Turkey, it’s China.”
Like Ambassador Jeffrey, Dr. Schmidt sees a certain determination to “call out things for what they are” in Mr. Biden’s Armenian genocide statement and his willingness to call out human rights abusers more broadly. But beyond simply truth-telling, he sees the president moving to implement what Dr. Schmidt says is the Democratic Party’s “vision of national security that says, the more democracies and the more respect for human rights in the world, the safer America is and the stronger its position in the world.”
Indeed, he sees the influence of Samantha Power, Mr. Biden’s nominee to run the United States Agency for International Development and a longtime Democratic human rights advocate, behind the president’s human rights focus and his willingness to use the word “genocide.”
– CSMonitor.com
He notes that Ambassador Power “pushed hard” in the early 1990s for steps to head off the ethnic violence that became the Rwanda genocide, and considered the Clinton administration’s inaction “a shameful blunder.”
“She continued in the Obama administration to promote the idea that getting involved in human rights and calling out abuses is in our interest,” Dr. Schmidt says, “even if sometimes it’s the hard thing to do.”
Which is not to say that President Biden tossed all diplomatic niceties to the wind with his Armenian genocide statement.
Soner Cagaptay, an expert in U.S.-Turkish relations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted on Twitter shortly after the statement was issued that the diplomats who wrote it showed a “mastery” of Turkish politics and history – attributing the genocide to the Ottoman Empire, never once mentioning Turkey, and even referencing Constantinople, the Ottoman capital that is present-day Istanbul.
Moreover, Mr. Biden had even telephoned Mr. Erdoğan the day before issuing the statement to forewarn him that it was coming.
One question now is whether the president has taken all his major get-real-and-move-on actions with the Armenian genocide and Afghanistan withdrawal decisions, or if there are more to come.