Ethiopia needs U.S. attention — presidential attention, at that

During my eight years on the White House National Security Council staff, it was clear that any decision relating to nuclear weapons would be made by President Bill Clinton. Ever since the nuclear attacks ending World War II that together killed or injured more than 200,000, the horrific potential of a single nuclear weapon to decimate defenseless civilian populations had made such decisions inherently presidential.

In my tenure, the president signed more than 20 directives relating to our nuclear stockpile and arms control talks. Most recently, President Joe Biden had to agree to reaffirm the principle that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” overcoming four years of resistance to that pledge during the Trump era.

A nuclear weapon, however, is not the only weapon capable of inflicting mass destruction — a lesson we are learning again today in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, where a man-made famine now threatens millions.

Last November, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — claiming he was responding to an attack by the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), on a federal army base following a disputed election and aid cutoff from the central government — ordered the Ethiopian military into Tigray, supported by local Amhara militias and Eritrea.The resulting campaign — involving torture, rape, execution, blockades, starvation and ethnic cleansing — has inflicted a human cost in lives rivaling that of a nuclear bomb.

With the Tigray forces now on the offensive, a wider war and devastation awaits. The Ethiopian diaspora in Minnesota, one of the largest in the United States, suffers as family and friends have been cut off from contact, or worse.

The U.S. had no role in starting this ill-conceived war, but only the U.S., working with its allies in the European Union and others with influence in Ethiopia, has the influence and power to bend the parties toward a ceasefire, negotiations and political resolution. And just as anything nuclear is inherently presidential, so is stopping an unfolding genocide. Biden will need to engage.

Whereas presidential responsibility for nuclear use has been clear, presidents have been hesitant to accept the same mantle of authority applied to genocide. When crises have arisen over the past three decades in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Myanmar, sub-Cabinet and Cabinet officials have typically taken the lead, meeting to debate the facts and the U.S. national interest and to pursue measures that have one thing in common: They do not fundamentally alter the deadly dynamic on the ground until thousands have paid with their lives.

Ethiopia, the second largest country in Africa and an engine for economic growth and prosperity across the continent, is on the verge of a total war with itself, a war that could lead to years of suffering and ultimately the disintegration of the Ethiopian state. Already, tens of thousands have died, 2 million of Tigray’s 6 million people reportedly have fled their homes, and famine conditions on a biblical scale have been imposed as a weapon of war.

Biden issued a written statement on Ethiopia in May expressing his deep concern. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has consistently called for the Ethiopian government to end the conflict and stop the atrocities, and the appointment of Jeffrey Feltman as U.S. special envoy for the Horn of…