Washington risks prioritizing political expediency over justice after mass atrocity.
“America’s belief in human dignity will guide our policies.” — President George W. Bush
U.S. foreign policy under the Trump administration reflects a nation in moral crisis. Our long-standing American principles and values have been cast aside in direct defiance of the country’s aspirations to form a more just and perfect union.
From our abandonment of Ukraine to an unprovoked war with Iran, U.S. foreign policy has been weaponized through deliberate actions that strip people around the world of their dignity and betray the ideals America claims to defend.
And while this may not be the administration’s most egregious assault on truth and human dignity, the U.S. State Department’s decision “to impose visa restrictions on hardline members of the TPLF and their immediate family members” is an affront to every people who has endured genocide—including Armenians, Jews, Rwandans, and the Rohingya—and a cruel repudiation of the promise that such atrocities must never again be minimized, excused, or repeated.
Genocide matters. Yet in the case of these visa sanctions, the U.S. has deliberately chosen to set aside accountability and justice in determining who will lead the Tigrayan people toward a durable peace with Ethiopia.
Genocide creates a qualitatively different moral context in any postwar setting. The intent to destroy an entire people transforms peacebuilding and political transition from ordinary post-conflict negotiation into confronting genocide without euphemism.
It begins with the perpetrators acknowledging the humanity of the people they tried to exterminate, followed by concrete actions and accountability for the horrific violence inflicted upon them. Any arrangement that asks Tigrayans to accept a future shaped by those who sought to destroy them, without truth, accountability, or justice, does not offer the chance for a durable peace.
It risks turning survival into surrender and human dignity into a bargaining chip. Political cooperation with alleged perpetrators cannot be treated as ordinary pragmatism if it occurs without acknowledgment, accountability, and justice.
The language used in the U.S. State Department’s visa restrictions announcement could be taken straight out of Abiy Ahmed’s playbook. It “targets individuals who are responsible for, or complicit in, undermining resolution to the crisis in the Tigray region.”
According to the announcement, these people are the “hardliners,” a term that specifically refers to Debretsion Gebremichael and senior military or party figures who reject the post-Pretoria political arrangement as presently implemented.
The “hardliners” believe that the government is not abiding by the Pretoria Agreement, have lost confidence in the interim government, and see the TPLF as Tigray’s principal political organization. Specifically, “hardliners” refers to those who do not support Abiy Ahmed or Getachew Reda.
The risk of presenting a false equivalence between the perpetrators of genocide and the current TPLF leadership is consequential. By focusing punitive attention on TPLF figures, the United States risks reframing the aftermath of mass atrocity as a problem of Tigrayan political intransigence rather than a crisis rooted in the destruction inflicted on Tigrayan society.
Why shift accountability away from a government that inflicted mass atrocities on a people and expect the victims alone to carry the burden of peacebuilding? This kind of policy only succeeds in entrenching denial and rewarding impunity for the very perpetrators of the crime.
This decision did not arise in isolation. Rather, it reflects the convergence of political currents among three groups of political actors united, for different reasons, around a common objective: the marginalization of the TPLF and the construction of a post-TPLF political order in Tigray.
The first group consists of former TPLF leaders in Addis Ababa who have entered what some describe as a tactical alliance with the Ethiopian government. This alliance is reportedly aimed at preserving the Pretoria Agreement and advancing a post-TPLF future for Tigray.
A more cynical perspective sees this group as engaging in a struggle for power in Tigray on the backs of their own people. This group is using the Pretoria Agreement and an alliance with the federal government to displace their political rivals and seize power from their former comrades.
The argument for political accommodation to achieve peace is overtaken in the context of the absence of accountability. The tragic spectacle and grotesque irony of those who named the crime of genocide, now legitimizing the perpetrators of genocide, reveals the moral collapse at the core of this alliance.
The second group consists of members of the Ethiopian diaspora in the United States. Dominated by septuagenarian remnants of Ethiopia’s 1970s opposition movements, they struggle for political relevance inside Ethiopia but remain effective political actors in the United States, where they have cultivated strong relationships with elected officials.
Their opposition to the TPLF and its current leadership predates the 2020 war and has roots stretching back to the 1970s student movement. By 1991, with the ascendance of the EPRDF, these latte warriors began to organize into vocal and effective constituencies committed to opposing the new government in Addis Ababa.
They translated long-standing grievances against the EPRDF into the familiar American language of democracy and human rights, making their opposition more credible and persuasive to U.S. audiences, particularly inside the U.S. Capitol.
“TPLF minority rule” and “ethnic dictatorship” replaced “ethnic federalism,” while “authoritarian regime” replaced “developmental state,” creating a simple shorthand that allowed U.S. officials to view Ethiopia’s complex political order through familiar categories of minority domination, repression, and democratic failure.
The current TPLF leadership has been unable to shake off this carefully constructed narrative, which has now been repurposed to turn the principal political organization of a people emerging from mass atrocity into the accused—while those responsible for Tigray’s destruction are rehabilitated as indispensable partners in peace.
The third group consists of U.S. diplomats and former diplomats who have sought to shape Ethiopia’s political trajectory from 1991 to the present. Although the United States benefited greatly from the EPRDF’s cooperation on counterterrorism in the rough neighborhood of the Horn of Africa, it remained a consistent and vocal critic of the government’s record on democratization, economic development, human rights, and regional policy, including Ethiopia’s 2006 intervention in Somalia.
Given the long-held narrative embraced by the U.S. foreign policy establishment, it is much more convenient for the State Department to target the TPLF leadership rather than Abiy Ahmed and his government as obstacles to peace.
The result is a policy that disciplines the aggrieved party for resisting the consequences of war while largely accommodating the government that emerged from that war politically strengthened.
For Ethiopia and Tigray, the struggle over the TPLF is ultimately a struggle over who controls memory, legitimacy, and the political meaning of Tigray’s survival. The TPLF is more than a political movement. It is an institutional manifestation of an idea forged through rebellion, sacrifice, federalism, and survival.
Time and again throughout Ethiopian history, Tigrayans have fought with extraordinary courage, endurance, and resistance against invasion, marginalization, famine, war, and now genocide. Each time, they have stood back up, preserving their identity, reclaiming their political agency, and refusing to allow struggle to become erasure.
That history explains why the TPLF cannot simply be dismantled by decree, divided through political engineering, or consigned to the “dustbin of history.”
When diplomacy punishes the victimized while accommodating the powerful, it no longer serves peace; it ratifies the political consequences of violence. By supporting Abiy Ahmed and treating the TPLF principally as a threat to be contained, the United States risks mistaking state power for legitimacy, diplomatic stability for justice, and the silence of the victims for sustainable peace.
Genocide is not an ordinary conflict to be managed through transactional diplomacy. It is a morally repugnant crime that seeks to erase a people from history. Any policy that ignores accountability for such a crime does not merely fail the victims—it degrades the very idea of justice.
In choosing stability without justice and diplomacy without accountability, Washington does not merely risk another Ethiopian war; it risks becoming complicit in the denial of genocide itself.
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While this commentary contains the author’s opinions, Ethiopia Insight will correct factual errors.
Main photo: TPLF officials Amanuel Assefa and Addisalem Balema meet with a foreign delegation led by U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia Ervin Massinga in Mekelle, July 2026. Source: Office of the President of Tigray.
Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
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