Ahead of the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day on Friday, April 24, The Washington Times has published an article calling on US President Donald Trump’s administration to officially recognize the Armenian Genocide, noting that in the current circumstances such a decision goes far beyond historical symbols.

The article’s author, who is the grandson of genocide survivors, notes that despite the Armenian Genocide’s recognition by the US Congress in 2019 and the official recognition by the president in 2021, the current administration has avoided the word “genocide” over the past year, replacing it with vague terms such as “great calamity” and “historical tragedy.”

According to the article, this rhetorical rejection is no longer a localized disappointment among the Armenian diaspora. It has become a serious problem for a country that is waging an unpopular war amid heated debates about the proportionality of its attacks, including an attack on an Iranian school that killed more than 100 children. Calls by American leaders to adhere to international norms and human rights sound meaningless when those same officials refuse to apply these standards to documented historical facts.

The article links Washington’s silence also to the fate of a peace settlement in the South Caucasus, a region that Trump presents as one of his foreign policy achievements. According to the author of this article, it was this silence that created the vacuum that allowed Azerbaijan to expel more than 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, the largest forced displacement since the Armenian Genocide.

“Recognition is the currency of credibility. If the [US] president [Trump] expects the international community to trust the American narrative regarding justice and stability in a postwar Middle East, then he cannot simultaneously cave to foreign pressure regarding the crimes of the past," the article adds, in particular.