Just over a week ago, Joe Biden acted like Joe Biden and called the Russian campaign in Ukraine “genocide” — leaping ahead of key US allies, the State Department and the facts at hand.
The comment provoked a stir among people nervous about the American escalation and praise from people who want it (notably the president of Ukraine). In general, I’m on the side of nervous people: in a conflict with a nuclear power, it’s always interesting to lower the existential stakes, and accusations of genocide should only be made on very clear evidence, as are calls for regime change (Bidenism Biden’s previous one, which had to be debunked) should be done, well…pretty much never.
Unlike the talk of regime change, which the Kremlin takes seriously because it believes the United States wants to plan a “color revolution” in Moscow, the accusation of genocide may strike Vladimir Putin as more of a flourish than a threat. After all, nothing in recent history suggests that the term is used by Western powers with any real consistency or certainty or in a way that provokes a coherent American response.
It’s not for lack of discussion and effort. The experience of the 1990s, when the United States turned away from the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda and later intervened from the air to prevent ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, seemed to provide models of how the “pax americana” or “order rules-based international policy” should work. When there was a threat of genocide, there was a responsibility to protect the threatened population. When it was decided that genocide had taken place, there was a responsibility to bring the responsible parties before an international court.
But reality did not yield to this ideal structure. Instead, we have cases, as in Iraq and Libya, where dictators were punished for past or threatened atrocities but faced harsh justice, not in The Hague, and the American-led military interventions that toppled them were widely seen as reckless or disastrous.
We have cases, like in the Darfur region of Sudan, and now with the Rohingyas in Myanmar, where the genocide label was affixed, but there was no US military response. We have a case like the Second Congo War, where mass killings and atrocities continued for years without a genocide determination — or, indeed, without receiving much Western attention.
And then there’s the recent case of China’s oppression of its Uighur minority, which the State Department declared to be genocide in early 2021 — a statement that didn’t exactly lead to serious international consequences for the Beijing regime.
This last example is especially relevant to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in the sense that it answers a question raised by Biden’s comment on genocide.
If a nuclear-armed power commits crimes against humanity in territory it controls, will the United States go to war to stop them? Ask the Uighurs. Or, for that matter, the Chechens, who certainly suffered as much from Russian cruelty as the Ukrainians, without anyone suggesting that we could risk nuclear war for their sake.
But this cold remark is not advice from despair. The idea of an international, process-oriented approach to genocide or any war crime has always been a fantasy. But a more realistic calculation still leaves room for doing everything possible to make mass murderers pay a price. You just need to adapt your approach and accept that you are not setting a universal rule.
Both the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides ended with the genociders suffering a devastating military defeat – but at the hands of Rwandan and Croatian rebel armies, respectively, not US or UN ground troops. The end of the Islamic State’s depredations, however, came with US military support, but with the Iraqi army as a key actor on the ground.
This suggests that where there is a plausible local military actor to lead the effort, international support can tip the balance against war criminals. Where there isn’t, we can sometimes have a longer game: years after the genocide in Darfur, Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir could finally face an international court after being overthrown in a coup.
But sometimes all you can do is witness. We would not invade the Soviet Union to avenge the Holodomor or put Mao Tse-tung on trial for the Great Leap Forward, nor should we expect to see Xi Jinping in the dock.
The situation in Ukraine is a different case. It is very unlikely that Putin will fall from power; it would be insane to try to force regime change. At the same time, there is an army in the field that has shown itself capable of fighting it, with international support, but without direct US intervention. And that good news, however tentative, seems to be what our president should be emphasizing — the real situation, not the hypothetical escalation.
Is Putin Committing Genocide? Not yet, folks, and now, with our support, the Ukrainians are making sure he doesn’t have that opportunity.
