Turkey has vowed to respond to President Joe Biden’s use of the term genocide in a formal statement April 24 to mark the 106th anniversary of the mass killings of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915. It was the first time a US president referred to the Armenian tragedy in those words, a measure of the awful state of US-Turkish relations but also of Biden’s ethical foreign policy stance.

In an April 25 interview with the Reuters news agency, Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin called the characterization “simply outrageous” and said, “There will be reaction of different forms and kinds and degrees.” He did not specify what these would be and would only say, “At a time and place that we consider to be appropriate, we will continue to respond to this very unfortunate, unfair statement.”

So far Turkey’s only move was to summon US Ambassador David Satterfield in the late evening of April 24 for a formal protest. In fact, Ankara’s response has been remarkably muted given the decades of diplomatic and financial capital it spent on seeking to prevent just such a statement. Turkey’s swashbuckling president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has yet to comment.

Meanwhile, Erdogan's overtly anti-American interior minister, Suleyman Soylu, reserved his ire to a single tweet. “The United States does not know history. Because it has no history of its own. Therefore, the words that were put in its president’s mouth have no value whatsoever,” he said.