Last December, in what already seems like another era, the U.S. Senate joined the House of Representatives in voting overwhelmingly to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Few issues have brought about any sort of bipartisan consensus in Congress recently, but this was one. In passing this resolution, Congress urged “education and public understanding of the facts of the Armenian Genocide, including the American role in the humanitarian relief effort, and the relevance of the Armenian Genocide to modern-day crimes against humanity.” This article takes up that challenge. Specifically, what it tries to explain is why the struggle for survival of one of the world’s smallest nations became so entangled in the foreign policies of the two most powerful nations — the United States and the British Empire — before, during, and after World War I.
In doing so, it explores the possibilities, limitations, and continued dilemmas of humanitarian intervention today. Since the 1990s, scholars have been drawn back to studying the international response to one of the 20th century’s first genocides in an attempt to uncover historical precedents for dealing with humanitarian atrocities. Most notable was Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which begins with the slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Power argues that Woodrow Wilson’s indifference to the massacres inaugurated a century of U.S. presidents adopting a “consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide.”
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