Last Updated On: Apr 23 2021 10:47 Gmt+3
Turkish opposition figures and government officials find themselves on the same side in a rare occurrence, uniting against the possibility of U.S. President Joe Biden recognising the events of 1915 as a genocide.
Main opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, of the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), said in a written statement that Biden using the word “genocide” in the annual presidential message he will give on the memorial day on April 24, which marks the beginning of the deportation procedures for Ottoman Istanbul’s Armenian intellectuals in 1915, would be “unrighteous, uncalled for, and unjust”.
His reference to a “growing rivalry from China and Russia and other authoritarian states” echoed the themes laid out in the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy and Indo-Pacific Strategy Statement.
In their hearings, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines also painted broad policy strokes that suggest significant continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations on national security matters. Both promised to devote greater attention to China as a growing “adversary.”
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Austin: “China is the pacing threat for the United States. The Indo-Pacific must be the focus of the department.”
Haines: “China is a challenge to our security, to our prosperity, to our values across a range of issues, and I do support an aggressive stance . . . one that is more assertive than where we had been in the Obama-Biden administration.”