On Feb. 24, 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine. Though the reasons for Russia’s invasion were complex, the offensive constituted an illegal attack on a sovereign nation. The U.S. government immediately and strongly condemned the invasion and began sending billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine, with President Joe Biden stating, “If we abandon the core principles of the United States to appease an aggressor, can any member state in this body feel confident that they are protected?”
However, the American government has refused to punish Azerbaijan for its ethnic cleansing in Arteksah, aided Saudi Arabia’s genocide in Yemen and unilaterally supports Israel as it engages in settler colonialism. This hypocrisy demonstrates how American foreign policy is based on imperialism and hegemony, rather than the values of human rights and democracy.
In December 2022, in violation of a 2020 peace agreement, the nation of Azerbaijan blockaded the sole entrance to the Republic of Artsakh, an ethnically Armenian breakaway state located in the South Caucasus. After nine months of this blockade, leaving Armenians in Artsakh starving and without medical care, Azerbaijan launched a full-scale invasion of Artsakh. In what amounted to ethnic cleansing, Azerbaijan committed horrific war crimes and forced 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee their homes. However, the U.S. refused to even sanction Azerbaijan for its horrific violation of international law. Why? Azerbaijan is a valuable U.S. ally, and the Biden administration does not want to lose the nation as a strategic partner, despite these horrific war crimes.
Perhaps an even more disturbing representation of this dynamic can be seen in Yemen, where the U.S. is complicit in the war crimes committed by Saudi Arabia’s repressive monarchy. In 2014, a civil war between Iranian-backed rebels and the Saudi-backed government threw the country into a crisis. In 2015, Saudi Arabia intervened in the conflict directly, sending ground troops into the fray and blockading Yemen’s ports. This intervention has directly helped create one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with Saudi Arabia being responsible for numerous attacks on children and schools during the conflict. In 2021, Saudi troops massacred hundreds of unarmed Ethiopian refugees on the Yemeni border.
The U.S. government enabled Saudi war crimes by providing Saudi Arabia with missiles and other weaponry. In 2018, one of these missiles was used to destroy a school bus full of children. In 2022, another was used to obliterate a detention center with hundreds of civilians inside. However, despite these horrific war crimes (which have been described as genocidal), the U.S. has continued to militarily support Saudi Arabia by supplying them with weapons worth billions of dollars.
Israel is another murderous recipient of American aid. For decades, the apartheid regime has quietly expanded settlements in the occupied West Bank and has loudly launched attacks against civilian targets in the Gaza Strip. The U.S., however, has ignored these human rights violations while sending Israel billions of dollars in military aid and defending the country in the UN.
Israel escalated its human rights violations after Hamas militants launched an offensive against Israeli settlements near the Gaza Strip last week. The Israeli government first began indiscriminately bombing the Gaza Strip, where 2.2 million Palestinians (nearly half of them children) live in the world’s largest open-air prison. The Israeli government even shut off food, water and electricity to the besieged Gaza Strip. These actions were described by Raz Segal, Israeli professor of Holocaust and genocide studies, as a “textbook case of genocide.” Despite Israel’s horrific actions, the U.S. has continued to support the country and has even sent a carrier strike group to the Eastern Mediterranean to support Israel’s merciless bombing of Palestinians.
The American government has shown a clear pattern of supporting aggressive, autocratic regimes, in contrast to its stated humanitarian values. This utter hypocrisy demonstrates that the U.S. government does not care about human rights or democracy, it cares about its empire. Azerbaijan and Israel are both important strategic allies and the U.S. imports billions of dollars of oil from Saudi Arabia. A similar dynamic is occurring with Turkey, Egypt and the Syrian Opposition, other Middle Eastern allies with a horrific track record in human rights.
To challenge our oppressive foreign policy, in order to change the fact that America is viewed worldwide as the primary threat to global peace, we will need to go beyond voting for one politician or the other come election season. Joining an anti-war group or campus solidarity group is a solid first step towards challenging American imperialism. In the 1980s, Tufts students played a notable role in protests against Ronald Reagan’s support for the “death squad democracy” of El Salvador, according to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), and protested the apartheid regime in South Africa. Tufts students should continue our proud tradition of anti-war activism by fighting American imperialism, wherever it appears.
