Posted on May 4, 2021. Joe Biden has just officially recognized the Armenian genocide. For Jules Boyadjian, president of the Committee for the Defense of the Armenian Cause, this recognition weakens Turkey’s position within NATO. President Joe Biden has just formally recognized the Armenian genocide. Some 106 years after the massacres that left more than 1 1/2 million dead in the Ottoman Empire, and 20 years after a law was passed in France recognizing the Armenian genocide, the United States, through the voice of its president, has stepped in. The reason we have had to wait so many years for an American president to brand those acts as genocide is certainly not due to any lack of historical knowledge or scientific doubt — a relentless flow of studies published in the United States has demonstrated the reality of the Armenian genocide — it is because of the very strong political and diplomatic dimension that the White House ascribes to these gestures. For the United States, this recognition holds symbolic power, not as a gesture of remembrance so much as a geopolitical one. The message carries no ambiguity given the context in which it was delivered.