Welcome to our annual special on the Armenian Genocide. This year, U.S.-Armenian relations made headlines in a revealing way. In February 2026, Vice President JD Vance became the first sitting U.S. vice president to visit Armenia. His office posted—then swiftly deleted—a message saying he was at the Armenian Genocide Memorial to "honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide." The White House called it a staff error. A replacement post went up with all mention of the word "genocide" stripped out. When pressed, Vance called the massacre "a very terrible thing that happened a little over 100 years ago"—and left it there.
The visit wasn't only about memory. Vance and Prime Minister Pashinyan signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement worth up to $5 billion in initial U.S. exports— part of a broader push to pull Armenia out of Russia's orbit. Vance then traveled to Azerbaijan, advancing plans for a U.S.-backed trade and transit corridor aimed at bypassing both Russia and Iran.
It's a familiar pattern: Armenia is valuable enough to court as a geopolitical piece on Washington DC's chessboard, but not important enough to have its genocide named out loud — because that might upset Turkey, the NATO ally whose cooperation is needed more.
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