Why the U.S. Finally Called a Genocide in Myanmar a ‘Genocide’

Four years ago, the State Department began an investigation into the Myanmar military’s brutal operation against the country’s Rohingya Muslims the prior year, which had resulted in scores of deaths and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya being pushed into Bangladesh. The report, spanning thousands of pages, was finalized when Mike Pompeo was still secretary of state, and he ultimately opted to call the armed forces’ actions “ethnic cleansing,” a descriptive term not defined by international law.

Today, with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a weighty backdrop, his successor, Antony Blinken, went further. Blinken declared that the campaign against the Rohingya fit the definition of the gravest of crimes, uttering a word that human-rights activists had long argued applied to Myanmar: genocide.

In 2018, the Trump administration opted against using the G-word—a designation that carries possible repercussions such as limits on aid and additional sanctions against the military, as well as the prospect of international firms halting business in the country—for reasons that are quintessential to that White House, at once geopolitical (it did not