Analysis. John Marshall Evans is a happy American Ambassador. Fifteen years after he was dismissed from his post in Yerevan by the Bush administration for having recognized the genocide of the Armenians, US President Joe Biden finally agreed with him on April 24 by calling him genocide. the massacres and deportations of Armenians committed during the First World War. “I am finally relieved by this decision, declared to World the diplomat now retired, and am not animated by any grudge. “
One hundred and six years after the events, the United States thus joins the thirty or so States of the world which have made this gesture in favor of the unburied dead, of history and of peace. But the solemn declaration of the President of the United States, the world’s leading power, has a major strategic dimension for four reasons.
Paradigm shift
The recognition by the United States of the Armenian genocide first confirms the return of the theme of human rights in their foreign policy. Expressed by the grassroots of the Democratic Party, this need to reinject ethics into American diplomacy echoes the strong demand from a society sensitive to the image of the United States in the world. After distancing themselves from the Saudi ally in the war in Yemen, and condemning the “Acts of genocide” committed against the Uighurs in China, the United States “Honor all those Armenians who perished in the 1915 genocide”. This paradigm shift is part of a desire to reaffirm their return to the world stage in the face of the power of China, to rebuild an America shattered by endless wars and a world disfigured by the Covid-19 pandemic, where the the need for “human security” is more significant than before.
The second reason relates to a desire of the Biden administration to complete the work of Congress, whose two Chambers unanimously voted in 2019, resolutions recognizing the genocide of 1915. Old road of federal institutions and taking note of the broad national consensus around this thorny question, Joe Biden consolidated the vote of Congress, depositary of American democracy in accordance with the Constitution.
Claiming that present-day Turkey is not responsible for the 1915 genocide, Biden shows it the way forward to permanently break with state negationism
Another reason, more immediate, explains this decision of the White House. By recognizing the genocide, Washington sends a message to Turkey and Russia, this baroque team that is joining forces to try to dislodge Westerners from the Middle East and the Caucasus. The United States, co-chairs with France and Russia of the Minsk group, tasked by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe with finding a political solution to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, have been sidelined , in the fall of 2020, in the declaration marking the end of the war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, drafted under Russian-Turkish influence.
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