President Joe Biden’s expected decision to identify Ottoman atrocities against Armenians as a genocide could trigger a new diplomatic crisis with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and worsen U.S.-Turkish disputes on a range of issues.
“Erdogan, who some refer to as a neo-Ottoman leader, is emotionally invested as much in the Ottoman Empire as he is in the Turkish republic,” said former Turkish opposition lawmaker Aykan Erdemir, who leads the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “So for him, this is one red line very difficult to cross.”
That impediment deterred previous American presidents from using “genocide” to describe the Armenian ordeal during World War I, when Ottoman officials eager to “Turkify” the embattled empire expelled or killed about 1.5 million Armenian Christians. That hesitation has been fading in recent years, as lawmakers in both parties responsive to appeals from the Armenian diaspora, and China’s ongoing genocide against the Uyghur Muslims adds urgency to the condemnation of such abuses.
“After three decades of leading this fight in Congress, I am proud the U.S. government is poised to finally be able to say it without any euphemism: Genocide is genocide,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, said Thursday. “Having the full U.S. government affirm the facts of the Armenian genocide will send a strong signal that the truth and human rights, not ignorance and denial, shape our foreign policy.”
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Erdogan’s truculent embrace of the Ottoman legacy has characterized his disputes with U.S. officials on other fronts, while his overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin and high-stakes confrontations with neighboring ally Greece have created a rare degree of anger and unease within NATO. A genocide declaration would trigger a new uproar, even withdrawal of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, but perhaps only a superficial dispute, according to close observers of how Erdogan has responded to similar determinations from other countries.
“In most cases, you know, Turkey has an immediate very vocal reaction — it recalls its ambassador to these countries, threatens various forms of retaliation, but from the long term, relations bounce back to where they were,” Erdemir said. “My guess is it won’t be too different this time around.”
A prominent Armenian-American activist agreed. “They usually withdraw an ambassador,” Armenian National Committee of America Executive Director Aram Hamparian said Thursday. “That’s usually the first step.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu has warned Biden that such a determination, expected to come during a statement Saturday to mark the traditional anniversary of the beginning of the massacres, will deliver another blow to the alliance.
“Statements that have no legal binding will have no benefit, but they will harm ties,” Cavusoglu told Turkish media this week. “If the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs.”
The key details about the atrocities have been clear to the U.S. government since they began in 1915, in part because Ottoman officials were transparent about their plans with American diplomats.
“When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact,” then-U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr. recalled in his memoirs.
Erdogan drew condemnation last year when he used a provocative Turkish phrase that translates as “remnants of the sword” in reference to the Armenian people, drawing international condemnation from anti-genocide activists. The term “genocide” would not be coined until after the Holocaust, but the Jewish attorney who coined the term, Raphael Lemkin, acknowledged that he was influenced by the Armenian experience.
By then, the Cold War was the cardinal fact of geopolitics, and Turkey joined NATO as a key member of the transatlantic alliance just a few years after Lemkin’s work was enshrined in international law in the 1948 genocide convention.
“At a certain point, some things move outside the realm of the political and move into the moral realm, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here,” Hamparian said. “There’s no more appetite among U.S. policymakers to treat this as a commodity to be bartered.”
Erdogan has hemorrhaged political goodwill in the U.S. in recent years due to foreign policy disputes and his apparent support for violence against his critics — even when those critics are in Washington, D.C. The renewal of such disputes with the Biden administration might have domestic political utility for a Turkish government buffeted by economic troubles.
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“This will be a really welcome distraction for Erdogan, meaning he will finally have a chance to stop responding to opposition criticism about economic mismanagement and corruption,” Erdemir said. “This actually is one which would help Erdogan weather the next month or two. But beyond that, as I say, it’s back to business as usual. U.S. Turkish relations will have to deal with a long list of disagreements.”
