No sul do Cáucaso.
Anatol Lieven, Artin DerSimonian
Sidecar
A Rota Trump para a Paz e a Prosperidade Internacional (TRIPP), acordada em princípio em 8 de agosto em uma minicúpula em Washington entre Trump, o presidente azerbaijano Ilham Aliyev e o primeiro-ministro armênio Nikol Pashinyan, consiste em um projeto conjunto EUA-Armênia para construir e administrar conexões rodoviárias, ferroviárias e energéticas entre o Azerbaijão e seu enclave de Nakhchivan, a oeste, através da região armênia de Syunik (veja o mapa abaixo). Ao longo da fronteira sul da Armênia, o corredor de 43 quilômetros constitui uma parte fundamental de uma nova abordagem para uma solução diplomática do conflito de décadas entre os dois países.
Se construído, o TRIPP criaria as condições para uma ligação contínua entre o Azerbaijão e seu parente étnico e parceiro próximo, a Turquia. Também estabeleceria uma segunda rota para comércio e energia – além da existente através da Geórgia, ao norte – que liga a Europa à Ásia Central e à China, contornando a Rússia. A energia do Cáspio tornou-se mais importante para os EUA e a Europa como resultado da forte redução no fornecimento russo desde o início da guerra na Ucrânia. Se outro gasoduto leste-oeste é comercialmente viável permanece uma questão em aberto, assim como muito sobre o TRIPP como um todo. Planos concretos para a rota ainda precisam ser desenvolvidos, e ela só pode ser construída como parte de um acordo de paz final e abrangente, para o qual ainda existem obstáculos significativos. Além disso, não está de forma alguma claro que o governo Trump tenha a coerência, a experiência e a resistência necessárias para levar o TRIPP e o processo de paz a uma conclusão bem-sucedida.
Yet the advantages of the proposed corridor are obvious. For Azerbaijan, an overland link to its exclave and to Turkey. For Armenia, the prospect of ending – at least for a considerable time – Baku’s threats to seize and establish an Azerbaijani-controlled corridor by force, annexing Armenian territory and dealing a crushing strategic defeat to Armenia and Iran. The TRIPP, as currently envisaged, does not involve US troops, but a large-scale US infrastructure and commercial presence would be a huge deterrent to Azerbaijani aggression in the region. The TRIPP and a peace settlement would lead to the normalisation of relations between Armenia and Turkey, which have a fraught, centuries-old history, punctuated with violent episodes, reaching a monstrous apogee with the massacre of some 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Turkey closed its border with its eastern neighbour in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan, which was then facing significant losses to Armenian forces. The new corridor would re-open the border, allowing Armenian trade through Turkey to Europe and the Middle East.
For its part, Ankara’s support for a route to Azerbaijan and beyond can be seen as a late offspring of an old aspiration: to establish a Turkic sphere of influence that would extend through the southern Caucasus and across the Caspian Sea to the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. While this vision has only had limited resonance in Central Asia, in Turkey pan-Turkic ethno-nationalism is a central theme of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Erdoğan’s de facto coalition partner since 2015. In apparent pursuit of this ambition in the post-Soviet period, Turkey has become Azerbaijan’s key ally, providing significant diplomatic, political and, crucially, military backing to Baku, solidified in a 2010 strategic partnership and mutual support agreement as well as arms supply and training. Baku, in turn, has become an important oil and gas supplier to Turkey.
There are however two other regional players with the ability to undermine or (literally) sabotage the TRIPP, and the wider settlement that goes with it: Russia and Iran. While both have publicly expressed cautious optimism, both – especially Iran – have deep concerns. Hawks in Washington have been hailing this American project as an important step in rolling back Russian and Iranian influence in the southern Caucasus. The threat to Iran is more direct. The TRIPP would cut across – and potentially block – the important land route from the Persian Gulf through Iran, Armenia and Georgia to Russia and Europe; it would also establish a US presence within a few miles of Iran itself. Iranian fears in this regard have naturally increased considerably as a result of the Israeli and US attacks this year, and amid the talk in Israel and among US neocons and some European liberals of the need to break Iran up along ethnic lines, including by hiving off Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. This is unlikely to work – Iranian Azeris, who compose the country’s largest non-Persian group, are highly integrated and occupy many of the top positions in the state – but it is understandably worrying to Tehran.
The US and Israel are new regional players; Iran, Turkey and Russia are very old ones. In most political and media circles in Washington, Brussels, Paris and London, arguments that refer to history have become pointless. Your interlocutors simply do not understand what you are talking about, and lack both the basic knowledge and the intellectual vitality to try to understand. People who do not know that the Russian-Ukrainian relationship (sometimes largely conflicted, sometimes largely consensual) has lasted for more than 400 years, for example, are unlikely to realise that in committing their countries to turn Ukraine into a military barrier against Russia, they are making a commitment not for generations but for centuries to come – a ‘commitment’ which is therefore meaningless and empty.
Like the relations between Russia and Ukraine, the hopes of the Azeris and Turks have deep roots, as do the fears of the Iranians, Russians and many Armenians. The new TRIPP agreement involves complex issues of national identity and national security, local interests and international rivalries. What follows will seek to unravel some of these complexities – essential for any analysis that seeks to go beyond the clichés of the Western media and foreign policy establishments.
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The crux of the contemporary rivalry between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized as within Azerbaijan but with a history of self-rule by its Armenian majority. An answer, or rather non-answer, to the question of who Nagorno-Karabakh (in Armenian, Artsakh), ‘really’ belongs to is given by the (perhaps apocryphal) 19th-century survey which stated that Karabakh had an Armenian majority in winter and an Azerbaijani majority in summer, when Azeri tribes drove their sheep up to the mountain pastures there. It is unquestionable however that under Soviet rule, the region had an Armenian majority of almost 80% by 1989; but it also contained the old Azeri town of Shusha.
After the fall of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia each proclaimed their independence in May 1918. The result was ethnic wars across much of the region. Armenians and Azeris fought over the ethnically mixed regions of Karabakh, Nakhchivan (end-point of the planned TRIPP) and Zangezur. The invasion and conquest of Transcaucasia by Bolshevik forces in 1920-21 and the establishment of Soviet power suspended these clashes. Nakhchivan was made an autonomous republic within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and most of Zangezur became the southern Syunik province of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The creation of the Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) within Azerbaijan in 1923, however, left neither Armenians nor Azerbaijanis satisfied. Moreover, a large Armenian minority remained in the cities of Azerbaijan, and a large Azeri minority in Armenia.
During the later Soviet period, a number of appeals to Moscow to transfer Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia were rejected. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms paved the way for a new Armenian challenge to the long-standing status quo. In February 1988, the local assembly passed a public resolution to transfer the NKAO from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The Communist Central Committee once again shot down the resolution, but things were slipping beyond its control. In Armenia’s capital Yerevan, mass demonstrations broke out in support of the Karabakh Armenians, while the situation in Soviet Azerbaijan took a violent turn. Anti-Armenian pogroms began in the eastern coastal city of Sumgait. Escalating local violence in both republics contributed to the growing exodus of Armenians and Azerbaijanis from each other’s territory, seeking safety in their own titular Soviet republic.
In both Armenia and Azerbaijan, mass-nationalist pressure made it impossible for the local Communist authorities to seek a negotiated solution, even if one had been available. By the end of the 1980s, the restoration of peace would have required two things that would have contradicted Gorbachev’s entire wider programme (and perhaps, his own humane character): the imposition of direct rule from Moscow in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and a readiness to use military force against protesters.
By the time Soviet power collapsed completely in the autumn of 1991 and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence, the conflict had already entered a state of full-scale war, with Armenia fighting in support of the Nagorno-Karabakh forces. Though blockaded by both Azerbaijan and Turkey, Armenia was kept afloat economically by energy supplies from neighbouring Iran, whose rulers feared resurgent Azeri nationalism and the spread of Turkish influence. The next three years saw a succession of Armenian victories, leaving them in control of virtually all the former NKAO as well as most of the seven surrounding Azerbaijani regions, from which the Azeri population fled. In May 1994 a ceasefire mediated by the Russians was signed, but no Russian peacekeeping forces were introduced.
The so-called ‘no war, no peace’ dynamic, at play in other post-imperial conflicts in places like Kashmir, was to persist largely uninterrupted (except for limited exchanges of fire, most notably a four-day outbreak in 2016) for over two decades. Repeated attempts at international mediation, most notably by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by Russia, France and the United States, failed completely. The issue had apparently been decided in favour of Armenia on Bismarck’s terms of ‘blood and iron’; and so it would have remained, if the military balance between Armenia and Azerbaijan had stayed the same as it was in 1994.
But of course the great long-term flaw in Bismarckian reasoning is that military balances do not often remain unchanged for generations, and nor do international alliances. In the case of Azerbaijan, its much larger population, lucrative production and export of energy (including via the US-sponsored Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline across Georgia to Turkey), and military supplies from Turkey and Israel (for profit but also to cultivate Azerbaijan as a potential future ally against Iran), instilled the belief that time was on Baku’s side, and that it would eventually be able to build up armed forces capable of defeating the Armenians without needing to seek a compromise.
And this is indeed what happened. In September 2020 Azerbaijan launched a full-scale offensive that in 44 days imposed a crushing defeat on Armenian forces. Russia then brokered a ceasefire, backed this time by 2,000 Russian peacekeepers, that preserved the remainder of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh and the ‘Lachin corridor’ to Armenia. In return, Armenia had to agree to a future route between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, to be supervised by Russian border guards.
This unstable situation could only have endured if Moscow had been willing to send a military force to Nagorno-Karabakh strong enough to defeat any new offensive by Azerbaijan, or alternatively, if the West had been willing to impose a complete ban on the purchase of Azerbaijani energy if Baku resumed the war. It should be noted – especially by Ukraine – that despite a large Armenian diaspora in France and much talk in the EU of Europe’s responsibility for the security of the Caucasus, there was never the slightest suggestion of the West sending its troops to Nagorno-Karabakh. Nor was the West willing to do without Azerbaijani energy, as signified by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s 2022 agreement with Aliyev to double Azerbaijani gas supplies to the bloc. We may also note that though Armenia is an imperfect democracy and Azerbaijan a dynastic autocracy, the Biden administration’s repeated invocations of the need for an alliance of democracies against authoritarianism never mentioned this case.
As for Russia, although it has deep historical ties to Armenia – a huge Armenian diaspora lives in Russia and some of its members occupy senior positions in the Russian establishment – even if Moscow had been willing to fight Azerbaijan, both its military and its diplomatic calculations were completely upended by the bloody fiasco of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the long, bitter and horribly costly war that has resulted. Not only could the Russian army not afford to undertake another war; Russia had become seriously dependent on the semi-neutrality of Turkey in the Ukraine conflict, and that would assuredly have ended had Russia overtly backed Armenia with military force. Turkey has rejected Western sanctions against Russia, provides a crucial route for European imports through Georgia, Russian exports via the Bosphorus and Russian international flights.
Thus when in September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a new campaign to liquidate the remainder of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Russian peacekeepers stood aside, as did (from a greater distance) the US, EU and UN. Feeble virtue-signalling Western protests were ignored by Azerbaijan. The badly weakened Armenian army could do nothing (and in fact did nothing), in part fearing that a new defeat could lead to an Azerbaijani invasion of Syunik, in Armenia proper. The upshot was the destruction of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh, and the flight to Armenia of its entire Armenian population of around 100,000 people. Blood and iron have triumphed again; and this time, unlike in the 1990s, the triumph seems likely to last for the foreseeable future. As the Pashinyan government has candidly acknowledged, Armenia alone cannot possibly launch a new war against a much larger and better-armed Azerbaijan backed by Turkey and supplied by Israel.
In Armenia, the loss of the war for Nagorno-Karabakh has led to three interlinked results: aggravation of fears (increased by small-scale but menacing Azeri incursions into Armenia) that Azerbaijan will go on to conquer the Syunik region in southern Armenia; a belief in the Pashinyan government that Armenians must now concentrate on strengthening and developing the actual state of Armenia within its present borders, and abandon dreams of one day retaking Nagorno-Karabakh, let alone the ancient Armenian lands of eastern Turkey; and a tremendous wave of mass resentment against Armenia’s old ally Russia, which is held to have ‘betrayed’ Armenia by failing to come to its defence.
This last charge is not entirely fair. Quite apart from the Russian army’s (self-inflicted) quagmire in Ukraine, Russia never recognised the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh; the Russian-Armenian security treaty only covers the territory of Armenia proper; the Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh were far too weak to resist the Azerbaijani army without heavy reinforcement; and the small Russian military force of some 3,000 troops in Armenia is only bound to defend Armenia itself. Many Armenians still regard that force (backed by Russia’s nuclear arsenal) as a key deterrent against Turkey and the nightmare phantom (faded, but never entirely absent from Armenian minds) of a new genocide. For if there is anger against Russia, there is also an awareness that, in the words of an Armenian friend, ‘Western countries did not fight for us either – and never have.’
The Pashinyan government, while it has removed some Russian border guards from Armenia and suspended its active participation in the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), has not yet formally withdrawn from the alliance or sought to expel Russia from Armenia altogether. It has however taken estrangement from Russia as an occasion to engage the US in the peace process. Thus while Trump himself has not spoken in these terms, US and European commentary is full of celebration that the TRIPP agreement is ‘upstaging’ Putin and represents a ‘strategic defeat for Russia’.
This US engagement is also necessary for Pashinyan politically, because many Armenians – both in Armenia and in the powerful Armenian diaspora in the US – are deeply unhappy with his government’s policies, his increasingly undemocratic mode of rule and the officially sponsored campaign to focus Armenian identity overwhelmingly on the Republic of Armenia. For that country is after all only a small fraction of the old historic lands of Armenia. Indeed, Soviet Armenia originated as a kind of last redoubt of the Armenian people, packed with starving and traumatised refugees from the Ottoman Empire – refugees from whom a great many of the Armenian diaspora are descended. Pashinyan’s desire for reconciliation with Turkey – albeit from an extremely weak bargaining position – may make excellent practical sense, but it does not receive automatic sympathy from descendants of survivors of the 1915 genocide.
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How, then, to assess the significance of the TRIPP agreement? What are its chances of bringing peace to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and helping to stabilise the region? The TRIPP is a great deal more than a transport corridor, and more even than a path to a diplomatic settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan; it represents a significant development in the reconfiguration of the Caucasus, with strategic implications far beyond. So long as it remains in its current, non-military form, the transit route is in principle a promising initiative – one that might also have a beneficial influence on thinking about how to resolve conflicts elsewhere. Rendered into a Chinese-style principle, it could be said to represent a local version of the Great Capitalist Peace: hardly an ideal solution, but potentially better than the Western liberal-imperialist approaches of the past two generations, whether in their hard form of military intervention or their soft one of ‘conflict resolution’, ‘peace-building’ and its academic Siamese twin, conference-building. The soldiers, the diplomats and the humanitarians have all failed to bring peace. The engineers at least deserve a chance to try.
As presently conceived, the new transport route offers tangible benefits to Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey; and since it does not entail a US military presence, it poses no immediate threat to the vital interests of Russia and Iran. The TRIPP gives real, albeit soft, security guarantees to Armenia (assuming that no government in Baku would wish to kill, even accidentally, US contractors and engineers) but without engaging in a zero-sum move against Russia and Iran. In this of course it is very different from the Western approaches to Ukraine and Georgia since 2008, which have had such calamitous consequences for those countries. As long as the corridor does not involve US troops, and is not used to interdict communication between Iran and Russia or to support an expanded Israeli presence in Azerbaijan, both Iran and Russia will not like it but can likely live with it. Russia has provisionally welcomed the deal, but warned against a repetition of the ‘unfortunate experience’ of Western ‘conflict resolution’ in the Middle East.
If successful, the transport route would also offer constructive lessons for US global competition with China. In neighbouring Georgia, China is building two immense infrastructure projects: a new road including a nine-kilometre tunnel through the mountains to Russia, linked up with north-south transport connections to Turkey and Iran; and a new port on the Black Sea. The TRIPP can be seen as a peaceful and legitimate competitor to these Chinese initiatives. If the US is worried about expanding Chinese infrastructure ventures in Africa and South America, then instead of going into paranoid hysterics about the alleged Chinese quest for global domination and bullying countries to reject Chinese investment, the obvious and fair response is to build more infrastructure there itself (assuming of course that it is still capable of doing so).
How might the project become unstuck or go awry? The immediate barrier – perhaps an insuperable one – to a comprehensive peace settlement may be Azerbaijan’s demand that Armenia remove from its constitution a reference to unification with Nagorno-Karabakh. A change to the constitution requires a referendum – which the government in Yerevan could very well lose given the public perception in Armenia that they are being forced to make significant concessions at the barrel of a gun. The other great threat to the TRIPP and the peace settlement more broadly is that one or other – or all – of the players involved will overplay their hands or seek to undermine the project for their own purposes. Azerbaijan can obviously do so by making demands on Armenia – such as the constitutional amendment – that are chiefly symbolic but that Armenia cannot meet (there is no realistic chance of the Armenians recovering Nagorno-Karabakh, and if there were, no constitutional amendment would stop them). Russia and Iran can do so by trying to subvert and overthrow the Pashinyan government, or in the last resort simply blowing the TRIPP up. After what happened to Nord Stream 2, the Russians would after all feel they have an ample Western and/or Ukrainian precedent for such behaviour.
It is however unlikely that either Russia or Iran would take such a dangerous, and potentially disastrously counter-productive, step unless the TRIPP and the accompanying settlement were to become a more immediate threat to their interests. As far as Russia is concerned, that would be if Washington were to encourage the Armenian government to expel the Russian military – a completely unnecessary move from the point of view of a peace settlement, but very welcome both to US imperial hawks and Armenian government supporters who fear a Russian-backed coup or mass unrest against Pashinyan. As far as Iran is concerned, it would be if the TRIPP were to become the basis for the introduction of US troops, or US and Israeli operations aimed at destabilizing or destroying the Iranian state; and as far as both Russia and Iran are concerned, it would be if the TRIPP blocked the route between the two countries. Both also fear the increased Turkish influence in the region that the TRIPP would promote.
Despite the potential that the US presence in the Caucasus could be exploited for nefarious imperial purposes, it is important to note that American interests in the region, though real, are limited. Trump himself, and key parts of his base, are against new US military deployments in Eurasia, while the Pentagon is anxious to concentrate its forces on China. And as has been illustrated again and again in the Caucasus, without serious military forces on the ground the ability of outside actors to influence events will always be limited. Trump’s personal objective seems above all to achieve a diplomatic ‘win’ to offset the faltering Ukraine peace process.
The US is also of course a long way away, while Iran, Russia and Turkey are close; and a US-Israeli move to instrumentalize the corridor to attack or balkanize Iran would meet strong opposition, not only from Russia and Iran but also from Turkey, Azerbaijan’s indispensable supporter. Turkey would be deeply hostile to an Israeli security presence on its eastern border, and efforts to encourage Kurdish secession from Iran would awaken Turkey’s deep fears of Kurdish separatism within its own borders – the issue that has been the defining factor shaping Turkish security policy over the past two generations. A US Caucasian strategy that infuriated all three regional great powers would be reckless even by American standards, and would almost certainly be doomed to failure. Given Azerbaijan’s dependence on Turkey, it also seems unlikely that Baku would anger Ankara in this way; and indeed, so far – despite its huge purchases of Israeli weaponry – Azerbaijan has trodden very cautiously when it comes to allowing an Israeli security presence.
It is to be hoped that neither Trump nor any future US administration would adopt such a strategy; and certainly for either Armenia or Azerbaijan to go along with a militarised US presence would be foolish to the point of insanity. A common mantra across Central Asia, Georgia and Belarus today is the need for a ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy, keeping good relations with and economic links to Russia, China, the US and EU while avoiding subordination to any of them. And indeed, both the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments have sought to allay Russian and Iranian concerns by stressing the economic benefits they stand to gain from the TRIPP.
The states of the southern Caucasus would be well-advised to pursue this ‘multi-vector’ approach. For Armenians to place their security entirely in the hands of the US while infuriating two of their three most powerful neighbours would mean that they had learned absolutely nothing from their own history or that of US international commitments. For Azerbaijan to turn itself into a base not only for Israeli and US pressure on Iran to its south but also for US pressure on Russia to its north would be like a nut deliberately taking a seat between the jaws of a nutcracker.
In the terrible winter of 1992 in Yerevan, an Armenian official, asked how his country was going to withstand the economic effects of the Soviet collapse and the Turkish and Azerbaijani blockades (the answer was: largely with Russian and Iranian help), began by replying, ‘Well, you have to remember that in 782 BC . . . ’ It is to be hoped that his successors in Armenia and Azerbaijan still remember that history is a very long business, and that while they may get to choose American friends in this generation, they have no choice over their past and future neighbours.
A Rota Trump para a Paz e a Prosperidade Internacional (TRIPP), acordada em princípio em 8 de agosto em uma minicúpula em Washington entre Trump, o presidente azerbaijano Ilham Aliyev e o primeiro-ministro armênio Nikol Pashinyan, consiste em um projeto conjunto EUA-Armênia para construir e administrar conexões rodoviárias, ferroviárias e energéticas entre o Azerbaijão e seu enclave de Nakhchivan, a oeste, através da região armênia de Syunik (veja o mapa abaixo). Ao longo da fronteira sul da Armênia, o corredor de 43 quilômetros constitui uma parte fundamental de uma nova abordagem para uma solução diplomática do conflito de décadas entre os dois países.
Yet the advantages of the proposed corridor are obvious. For Azerbaijan, an overland link to its exclave and to Turkey. For Armenia, the prospect of ending – at least for a considerable time – Baku’s threats to seize and establish an Azerbaijani-controlled corridor by force, annexing Armenian territory and dealing a crushing strategic defeat to Armenia and Iran. The TRIPP, as currently envisaged, does not involve US troops, but a large-scale US infrastructure and commercial presence would be a huge deterrent to Azerbaijani aggression in the region. The TRIPP and a peace settlement would lead to the normalisation of relations between Armenia and Turkey, which have a fraught, centuries-old history, punctuated with violent episodes, reaching a monstrous apogee with the massacre of some 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians in 1915. Turkey closed its border with its eastern neighbour in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan, which was then facing significant losses to Armenian forces. The new corridor would re-open the border, allowing Armenian trade through Turkey to Europe and the Middle East.
For its part, Ankara’s support for a route to Azerbaijan and beyond can be seen as a late offspring of an old aspiration: to establish a Turkic sphere of influence that would extend through the southern Caucasus and across the Caspian Sea to the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. While this vision has only had limited resonance in Central Asia, in Turkey pan-Turkic ethno-nationalism is a central theme of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), Erdoğan’s de facto coalition partner since 2015. In apparent pursuit of this ambition in the post-Soviet period, Turkey has become Azerbaijan’s key ally, providing significant diplomatic, political and, crucially, military backing to Baku, solidified in a 2010 strategic partnership and mutual support agreement as well as arms supply and training. Baku, in turn, has become an important oil and gas supplier to Turkey.
There are however two other regional players with the ability to undermine or (literally) sabotage the TRIPP, and the wider settlement that goes with it: Russia and Iran. While both have publicly expressed cautious optimism, both – especially Iran – have deep concerns. Hawks in Washington have been hailing this American project as an important step in rolling back Russian and Iranian influence in the southern Caucasus. The threat to Iran is more direct. The TRIPP would cut across – and potentially block – the important land route from the Persian Gulf through Iran, Armenia and Georgia to Russia and Europe; it would also establish a US presence within a few miles of Iran itself. Iranian fears in this regard have naturally increased considerably as a result of the Israeli and US attacks this year, and amid the talk in Israel and among US neocons and some European liberals of the need to break Iran up along ethnic lines, including by hiving off Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan. This is unlikely to work – Iranian Azeris, who compose the country’s largest non-Persian group, are highly integrated and occupy many of the top positions in the state – but it is understandably worrying to Tehran.
The US and Israel are new regional players; Iran, Turkey and Russia are very old ones. In most political and media circles in Washington, Brussels, Paris and London, arguments that refer to history have become pointless. Your interlocutors simply do not understand what you are talking about, and lack both the basic knowledge and the intellectual vitality to try to understand. People who do not know that the Russian-Ukrainian relationship (sometimes largely conflicted, sometimes largely consensual) has lasted for more than 400 years, for example, are unlikely to realise that in committing their countries to turn Ukraine into a military barrier against Russia, they are making a commitment not for generations but for centuries to come – a ‘commitment’ which is therefore meaningless and empty.
Like the relations between Russia and Ukraine, the hopes of the Azeris and Turks have deep roots, as do the fears of the Iranians, Russians and many Armenians. The new TRIPP agreement involves complex issues of national identity and national security, local interests and international rivalries. What follows will seek to unravel some of these complexities – essential for any analysis that seeks to go beyond the clichés of the Western media and foreign policy establishments.
*
The crux of the contemporary rivalry between Azerbaijan and Armenia has been the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, internationally recognized as within Azerbaijan but with a history of self-rule by its Armenian majority. An answer, or rather non-answer, to the question of who Nagorno-Karabakh (in Armenian, Artsakh), ‘really’ belongs to is given by the (perhaps apocryphal) 19th-century survey which stated that Karabakh had an Armenian majority in winter and an Azerbaijani majority in summer, when Azeri tribes drove their sheep up to the mountain pastures there. It is unquestionable however that under Soviet rule, the region had an Armenian majority of almost 80% by 1989; but it also contained the old Azeri town of Shusha.
After the fall of the Russian Empire, the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia each proclaimed their independence in May 1918. The result was ethnic wars across much of the region. Armenians and Azeris fought over the ethnically mixed regions of Karabakh, Nakhchivan (end-point of the planned TRIPP) and Zangezur. The invasion and conquest of Transcaucasia by Bolshevik forces in 1920-21 and the establishment of Soviet power suspended these clashes. Nakhchivan was made an autonomous republic within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and most of Zangezur became the southern Syunik province of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. The creation of the Armenian-majority Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) within Azerbaijan in 1923, however, left neither Armenians nor Azerbaijanis satisfied. Moreover, a large Armenian minority remained in the cities of Azerbaijan, and a large Azeri minority in Armenia.
During the later Soviet period, a number of appeals to Moscow to transfer Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia were rejected. In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms paved the way for a new Armenian challenge to the long-standing status quo. In February 1988, the local assembly passed a public resolution to transfer the NKAO from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. The Communist Central Committee once again shot down the resolution, but things were slipping beyond its control. In Armenia’s capital Yerevan, mass demonstrations broke out in support of the Karabakh Armenians, while the situation in Soviet Azerbaijan took a violent turn. Anti-Armenian pogroms began in the eastern coastal city of Sumgait. Escalating local violence in both republics contributed to the growing exodus of Armenians and Azerbaijanis from each other’s territory, seeking safety in their own titular Soviet republic.
In both Armenia and Azerbaijan, mass-nationalist pressure made it impossible for the local Communist authorities to seek a negotiated solution, even if one had been available. By the end of the 1980s, the restoration of peace would have required two things that would have contradicted Gorbachev’s entire wider programme (and perhaps, his own humane character): the imposition of direct rule from Moscow in both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and a readiness to use military force against protesters.
By the time Soviet power collapsed completely in the autumn of 1991 and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence, the conflict had already entered a state of full-scale war, with Armenia fighting in support of the Nagorno-Karabakh forces. Though blockaded by both Azerbaijan and Turkey, Armenia was kept afloat economically by energy supplies from neighbouring Iran, whose rulers feared resurgent Azeri nationalism and the spread of Turkish influence. The next three years saw a succession of Armenian victories, leaving them in control of virtually all the former NKAO as well as most of the seven surrounding Azerbaijani regions, from which the Azeri population fled. In May 1994 a ceasefire mediated by the Russians was signed, but no Russian peacekeeping forces were introduced.
The so-called ‘no war, no peace’ dynamic, at play in other post-imperial conflicts in places like Kashmir, was to persist largely uninterrupted (except for limited exchanges of fire, most notably a four-day outbreak in 2016) for over two decades. Repeated attempts at international mediation, most notably by the OSCE Minsk Group co-chaired by Russia, France and the United States, failed completely. The issue had apparently been decided in favour of Armenia on Bismarck’s terms of ‘blood and iron’; and so it would have remained, if the military balance between Armenia and Azerbaijan had stayed the same as it was in 1994.
But of course the great long-term flaw in Bismarckian reasoning is that military balances do not often remain unchanged for generations, and nor do international alliances. In the case of Azerbaijan, its much larger population, lucrative production and export of energy (including via the US-sponsored Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline across Georgia to Turkey), and military supplies from Turkey and Israel (for profit but also to cultivate Azerbaijan as a potential future ally against Iran), instilled the belief that time was on Baku’s side, and that it would eventually be able to build up armed forces capable of defeating the Armenians without needing to seek a compromise.
And this is indeed what happened. In September 2020 Azerbaijan launched a full-scale offensive that in 44 days imposed a crushing defeat on Armenian forces. Russia then brokered a ceasefire, backed this time by 2,000 Russian peacekeepers, that preserved the remainder of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh and the ‘Lachin corridor’ to Armenia. In return, Armenia had to agree to a future route between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, to be supervised by Russian border guards.
This unstable situation could only have endured if Moscow had been willing to send a military force to Nagorno-Karabakh strong enough to defeat any new offensive by Azerbaijan, or alternatively, if the West had been willing to impose a complete ban on the purchase of Azerbaijani energy if Baku resumed the war. It should be noted – especially by Ukraine – that despite a large Armenian diaspora in France and much talk in the EU of Europe’s responsibility for the security of the Caucasus, there was never the slightest suggestion of the West sending its troops to Nagorno-Karabakh. Nor was the West willing to do without Azerbaijani energy, as signified by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s 2022 agreement with Aliyev to double Azerbaijani gas supplies to the bloc. We may also note that though Armenia is an imperfect democracy and Azerbaijan a dynastic autocracy, the Biden administration’s repeated invocations of the need for an alliance of democracies against authoritarianism never mentioned this case.
As for Russia, although it has deep historical ties to Armenia – a huge Armenian diaspora lives in Russia and some of its members occupy senior positions in the Russian establishment – even if Moscow had been willing to fight Azerbaijan, both its military and its diplomatic calculations were completely upended by the bloody fiasco of its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the long, bitter and horribly costly war that has resulted. Not only could the Russian army not afford to undertake another war; Russia had become seriously dependent on the semi-neutrality of Turkey in the Ukraine conflict, and that would assuredly have ended had Russia overtly backed Armenia with military force. Turkey has rejected Western sanctions against Russia, provides a crucial route for European imports through Georgia, Russian exports via the Bosphorus and Russian international flights.
Thus when in September 2023 Azerbaijan launched a new campaign to liquidate the remainder of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, Russian peacekeepers stood aside, as did (from a greater distance) the US, EU and UN. Feeble virtue-signalling Western protests were ignored by Azerbaijan. The badly weakened Armenian army could do nothing (and in fact did nothing), in part fearing that a new defeat could lead to an Azerbaijani invasion of Syunik, in Armenia proper. The upshot was the destruction of Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh, and the flight to Armenia of its entire Armenian population of around 100,000 people. Blood and iron have triumphed again; and this time, unlike in the 1990s, the triumph seems likely to last for the foreseeable future. As the Pashinyan government has candidly acknowledged, Armenia alone cannot possibly launch a new war against a much larger and better-armed Azerbaijan backed by Turkey and supplied by Israel.
In Armenia, the loss of the war for Nagorno-Karabakh has led to three interlinked results: aggravation of fears (increased by small-scale but menacing Azeri incursions into Armenia) that Azerbaijan will go on to conquer the Syunik region in southern Armenia; a belief in the Pashinyan government that Armenians must now concentrate on strengthening and developing the actual state of Armenia within its present borders, and abandon dreams of one day retaking Nagorno-Karabakh, let alone the ancient Armenian lands of eastern Turkey; and a tremendous wave of mass resentment against Armenia’s old ally Russia, which is held to have ‘betrayed’ Armenia by failing to come to its defence.
This last charge is not entirely fair. Quite apart from the Russian army’s (self-inflicted) quagmire in Ukraine, Russia never recognised the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh; the Russian-Armenian security treaty only covers the territory of Armenia proper; the Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh were far too weak to resist the Azerbaijani army without heavy reinforcement; and the small Russian military force of some 3,000 troops in Armenia is only bound to defend Armenia itself. Many Armenians still regard that force (backed by Russia’s nuclear arsenal) as a key deterrent against Turkey and the nightmare phantom (faded, but never entirely absent from Armenian minds) of a new genocide. For if there is anger against Russia, there is also an awareness that, in the words of an Armenian friend, ‘Western countries did not fight for us either – and never have.’
The Pashinyan government, while it has removed some Russian border guards from Armenia and suspended its active participation in the Russian-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO), has not yet formally withdrawn from the alliance or sought to expel Russia from Armenia altogether. It has however taken estrangement from Russia as an occasion to engage the US in the peace process. Thus while Trump himself has not spoken in these terms, US and European commentary is full of celebration that the TRIPP agreement is ‘upstaging’ Putin and represents a ‘strategic defeat for Russia’.
This US engagement is also necessary for Pashinyan politically, because many Armenians – both in Armenia and in the powerful Armenian diaspora in the US – are deeply unhappy with his government’s policies, his increasingly undemocratic mode of rule and the officially sponsored campaign to focus Armenian identity overwhelmingly on the Republic of Armenia. For that country is after all only a small fraction of the old historic lands of Armenia. Indeed, Soviet Armenia originated as a kind of last redoubt of the Armenian people, packed with starving and traumatised refugees from the Ottoman Empire – refugees from whom a great many of the Armenian diaspora are descended. Pashinyan’s desire for reconciliation with Turkey – albeit from an extremely weak bargaining position – may make excellent practical sense, but it does not receive automatic sympathy from descendants of survivors of the 1915 genocide.
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How, then, to assess the significance of the TRIPP agreement? What are its chances of bringing peace to Armenia and Azerbaijan, and helping to stabilise the region? The TRIPP is a great deal more than a transport corridor, and more even than a path to a diplomatic settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan; it represents a significant development in the reconfiguration of the Caucasus, with strategic implications far beyond. So long as it remains in its current, non-military form, the transit route is in principle a promising initiative – one that might also have a beneficial influence on thinking about how to resolve conflicts elsewhere. Rendered into a Chinese-style principle, it could be said to represent a local version of the Great Capitalist Peace: hardly an ideal solution, but potentially better than the Western liberal-imperialist approaches of the past two generations, whether in their hard form of military intervention or their soft one of ‘conflict resolution’, ‘peace-building’ and its academic Siamese twin, conference-building. The soldiers, the diplomats and the humanitarians have all failed to bring peace. The engineers at least deserve a chance to try.
As presently conceived, the new transport route offers tangible benefits to Azerbaijan, Armenia and Turkey; and since it does not entail a US military presence, it poses no immediate threat to the vital interests of Russia and Iran. The TRIPP gives real, albeit soft, security guarantees to Armenia (assuming that no government in Baku would wish to kill, even accidentally, US contractors and engineers) but without engaging in a zero-sum move against Russia and Iran. In this of course it is very different from the Western approaches to Ukraine and Georgia since 2008, which have had such calamitous consequences for those countries. As long as the corridor does not involve US troops, and is not used to interdict communication between Iran and Russia or to support an expanded Israeli presence in Azerbaijan, both Iran and Russia will not like it but can likely live with it. Russia has provisionally welcomed the deal, but warned against a repetition of the ‘unfortunate experience’ of Western ‘conflict resolution’ in the Middle East.
If successful, the transport route would also offer constructive lessons for US global competition with China. In neighbouring Georgia, China is building two immense infrastructure projects: a new road including a nine-kilometre tunnel through the mountains to Russia, linked up with north-south transport connections to Turkey and Iran; and a new port on the Black Sea. The TRIPP can be seen as a peaceful and legitimate competitor to these Chinese initiatives. If the US is worried about expanding Chinese infrastructure ventures in Africa and South America, then instead of going into paranoid hysterics about the alleged Chinese quest for global domination and bullying countries to reject Chinese investment, the obvious and fair response is to build more infrastructure there itself (assuming of course that it is still capable of doing so).
How might the project become unstuck or go awry? The immediate barrier – perhaps an insuperable one – to a comprehensive peace settlement may be Azerbaijan’s demand that Armenia remove from its constitution a reference to unification with Nagorno-Karabakh. A change to the constitution requires a referendum – which the government in Yerevan could very well lose given the public perception in Armenia that they are being forced to make significant concessions at the barrel of a gun. The other great threat to the TRIPP and the peace settlement more broadly is that one or other – or all – of the players involved will overplay their hands or seek to undermine the project for their own purposes. Azerbaijan can obviously do so by making demands on Armenia – such as the constitutional amendment – that are chiefly symbolic but that Armenia cannot meet (there is no realistic chance of the Armenians recovering Nagorno-Karabakh, and if there were, no constitutional amendment would stop them). Russia and Iran can do so by trying to subvert and overthrow the Pashinyan government, or in the last resort simply blowing the TRIPP up. After what happened to Nord Stream 2, the Russians would after all feel they have an ample Western and/or Ukrainian precedent for such behaviour.
It is however unlikely that either Russia or Iran would take such a dangerous, and potentially disastrously counter-productive, step unless the TRIPP and the accompanying settlement were to become a more immediate threat to their interests. As far as Russia is concerned, that would be if Washington were to encourage the Armenian government to expel the Russian military – a completely unnecessary move from the point of view of a peace settlement, but very welcome both to US imperial hawks and Armenian government supporters who fear a Russian-backed coup or mass unrest against Pashinyan. As far as Iran is concerned, it would be if the TRIPP were to become the basis for the introduction of US troops, or US and Israeli operations aimed at destabilizing or destroying the Iranian state; and as far as both Russia and Iran are concerned, it would be if the TRIPP blocked the route between the two countries. Both also fear the increased Turkish influence in the region that the TRIPP would promote.
Despite the potential that the US presence in the Caucasus could be exploited for nefarious imperial purposes, it is important to note that American interests in the region, though real, are limited. Trump himself, and key parts of his base, are against new US military deployments in Eurasia, while the Pentagon is anxious to concentrate its forces on China. And as has been illustrated again and again in the Caucasus, without serious military forces on the ground the ability of outside actors to influence events will always be limited. Trump’s personal objective seems above all to achieve a diplomatic ‘win’ to offset the faltering Ukraine peace process.
The US is also of course a long way away, while Iran, Russia and Turkey are close; and a US-Israeli move to instrumentalize the corridor to attack or balkanize Iran would meet strong opposition, not only from Russia and Iran but also from Turkey, Azerbaijan’s indispensable supporter. Turkey would be deeply hostile to an Israeli security presence on its eastern border, and efforts to encourage Kurdish secession from Iran would awaken Turkey’s deep fears of Kurdish separatism within its own borders – the issue that has been the defining factor shaping Turkish security policy over the past two generations. A US Caucasian strategy that infuriated all three regional great powers would be reckless even by American standards, and would almost certainly be doomed to failure. Given Azerbaijan’s dependence on Turkey, it also seems unlikely that Baku would anger Ankara in this way; and indeed, so far – despite its huge purchases of Israeli weaponry – Azerbaijan has trodden very cautiously when it comes to allowing an Israeli security presence.
It is to be hoped that neither Trump nor any future US administration would adopt such a strategy; and certainly for either Armenia or Azerbaijan to go along with a militarised US presence would be foolish to the point of insanity. A common mantra across Central Asia, Georgia and Belarus today is the need for a ‘multi-vector’ foreign policy, keeping good relations with and economic links to Russia, China, the US and EU while avoiding subordination to any of them. And indeed, both the Armenian and Azerbaijani governments have sought to allay Russian and Iranian concerns by stressing the economic benefits they stand to gain from the TRIPP.
The states of the southern Caucasus would be well-advised to pursue this ‘multi-vector’ approach. For Armenians to place their security entirely in the hands of the US while infuriating two of their three most powerful neighbours would mean that they had learned absolutely nothing from their own history or that of US international commitments. For Azerbaijan to turn itself into a base not only for Israeli and US pressure on Iran to its south but also for US pressure on Russia to its north would be like a nut deliberately taking a seat between the jaws of a nutcracker.
In the terrible winter of 1992 in Yerevan, an Armenian official, asked how his country was going to withstand the economic effects of the Soviet collapse and the Turkish and Azerbaijani blockades (the answer was: largely with Russian and Iranian help), began by replying, ‘Well, you have to remember that in 782 BC . . . ’ It is to be hoped that his successors in Armenia and Azerbaijan still remember that history is a very long business, and that while they may get to choose American friends in this generation, they have no choice over their past and future neighbours.
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