On March 21, 2022, standing in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Antony Blinken said that beyond the Holocaust the United States had concluded seven times that genocide had been committed, and that the determination he was announcing that day about the Rohingya was the eighth.¹
Eight times in seventy-seven years. Then less than three years later it happened again, but this time in Sudan.
Survivors testify. Investigators spend years assembling evidence under conditions that make evidence almost impossible to gather. Diaspora communities lobby, coalitions organize, lawyers write memoranda, and members of Congress introduce resolutions that sit for a year before anybody moves them. The determination is treated, by nearly everyone involved, as the objective. Say the word, and the machinery engages.
Nothing in American law makes the word do anything.
The statute that comes closest is the Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act, signed in January 2019. Its requirements are interagency coordination, a declaration that atrocity prevention is in the national security interest, training for Foreign Service officers posted to countries at risk, and an annual report to four congressional committees.² Capacity, policy, training, paperwork. Not one clause attaches a consequence to a finding.
The government has admitted as much in writing. In its 2024 report to Congress under that Act, the State Department listed among its objectives exploring concrete steps and consequences to redress atrocities, including in situations where the Secretary of State has made an atrocity determination.³ Exploring. Five years after the Act, and after all but one of the determinations that follow, the consequences were still an item on a list of things to look into.
The Foreign Assistance Act does not close the gap either. Its annual human rights report must include information on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and evidence of acts that may constitute genocide.⁴ That is where a finding goes — into a report. Section 502B(c) lets Congress request a targeted report on a particular country and then move a joint resolution on assistance, a process the sponsor of one such resolution described as not prescriptive and as altering aid in no way whatsoever.⁵
The Leahy Laws bar assistance to individual units of a foreign security force when the Secretary of State has credible information that the unit committed a gross violation of human rights.⁶ Units, not governments. And the State Department’s own fact sheet lists what it counts as a gross violation for these purposes: torture, extrajudicial killing, enforced disappearance, and rape under color of law.⁷
Four categories, examined case by case. Starvation is not among them. Neither is blocking food. Neither is levelling a city block from the air. And the executive branch has read Leahy vetting to reach only assistance paid for out of appropriated funds, which exempts the bulk of commercial arms sales from it altogether.⁸
Congress’s own research service said it plainly in 2024. The Act contains no explicit prohibition or restriction on arming states that are or may be perpetrating genocide, and current law therefore leaves the executive branch broad discretion to decide whether to weigh such conduct at all, and how much weight to give it.⁴
This is not a fringe reading. The most thorough study of American practice, written for the Holocaust Memorial Museum by the State Department’s former Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice, catalogues the determinations and notes that nothing in the legal or policy framework requires one to be made at all.⁹ The same study found at least two situations, Sudan’s Two Areas in 2013 and Burma in 2018, where the department began working out whether genocide had occurred and never issued a public statement.⁹ Determinations are not only unenforced. They are optional.
There is one exception, and it turns out to be the hinge of this whole story. Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act prohibits security assistance to any country that restricts the transport or delivery of American humanitarian aid. It dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia in the 1990s and has almost never been enforced.¹⁰ But it is a real trigger: a finding of fact with a mandatory consequence bolted to it. That one comes back in the Gaza section. What happened to it there is the difference between this and a complaint about bureaucratic inertia.
The architecture has one more piece, and it says something about intent.
The United States was the first nation to sign the Genocide Convention, in 1948.¹¹ It did not make genocide a federal crime until November 1988, forty years later, through the Proxmire Act.¹² And when Congress finally wrote the crime, it wrote it narrower than the treaty it was implementing. The Convention prohibits acts intended to destroy a group in whole or in part. The American statute requires in whole or in substantial part.¹² A higher bar at home than the one the country had signed abroad. Congress then left a jurisdictional hole open for another nineteen years, so that perpetrators of the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides who reached the United States under false pretenses could not be prosecuted here at all, until the Genocide Accountability Act closed it in 2007.¹³
That is not a rhetorical flourish. There is no statute that fires when a Secretary of State reaches a genocide determination. Arms transfers do not pause. Assets do not freeze. No review is triggered, no license is suspended, no obligation attaches. Every consequence that follows a determination follows because someone separately chose to make it follow, through exactly the same discretionary channels that governed everything before the word was spoken.
But the determinations are not worthless. The ISIS determination fed accountability work and prosecutions. The Xinjiang determination produced the strongest forced-labor statute in American history, an entity list, and sanctions on Chinese officials. The Myanmar determination was followed by sanctions on the junta’s gas revenue. Things happened. The claim I’m making is narrower and harder to escape: none of it was compelled. Every one of those consequences arrived because somebody separately chose it, which means somebody could separately unchoose it.
Watch what happens to each one.
This piece follows four current cases in detail — Sudan, Gaza, Myanmar, and Xinjiang — and then takes a look at the three that built the pattern: Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. The four modern ones run from January 2021 to this summer, across two administrations and both parties. In each one a different part of the same architecture failed, and the failures point in opposite directions.
In Sudan, the United States determined genocide and then invoked an emergency provision in the Arms Export Control Act to sell weapons to the government arming the perpetrators.
In Gaza, it declined to determine anything, wrote the one finding that carried a mandatory consequence in the way that avoided the consequence, and then went to the International Court of Justice to argue for a narrower reading of the Genocide Convention.
In Myanmar, it made the determination, built the sanctions authorities to enforce it, and left most of them unused while the junta’s jet fuel imports rose sixty-nine percent in a year.
In Xinjiang, Congress did something different and better: it wrote a statute that removed the discretion entirely. The executive branch starved it anyway.
Two of those are stories about saying the word. Two are stories about what the word can and cannot compel. All four end the same way.
It’s important that I am precise about my claims, because the easy version of this argument is wrong. This is not a story about incompetence and it is not a story about a conspiracy. The procedures mostly worked. Every extension the ICJ granted was within its ordinary practice. Every emergency determination was authorized by the statute that authorizes emergency determinations. Nobody had to break anything — which is the whole problem.
I am also deliberately not making the influence argument here. There is a strong conversation around arms manufacturers, foreign lobbying, and campaign money, but other people are already making it well. This piece is about the mechanism, because the mechanism holds even if every official involved acted in perfect good faith.
I spent about fifteen years in federal consulting, at CMS, at FDA, on the ACA Marketplace, at the VA. Nothing in that work belongs in the same sentence as a mass atrocity and I won’t pretend it does. But I learned one thing that turns out to apply, and it is this: a requirement written into law is not a requirement until somebody funds the people who enforce it. I watched controls get drafted, approved, published, and then quietly not implemented, year after year, by people who never once said no to anything. There is no memo for that decision. There is nobody to hold accountable for it. The requirement just sits there on the page, fully intact, doing nothing at all.
That sentence recurs below, about four different groups of people, in four different parts of the government.
