This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do
With Us
ESSAY MAJ. DANNY
This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Has Nothing to Do
With Us
October 3, 2020
1 Commenton This Long-Standing Battle Between Armenia and Azerbaijan Has
Nothing to Do With Us
America doesn't really have a dog in this fight. Unless it decides it does -
which it's apt to do, especially in this madcap moment.
Nagorno Karabakh Defense Army troops assemble before the National Assembly
building on Renaissance Square in Stepanakert. [David Stanley / CC BY 2.0]
By Maj. Danny Sjursen / AntiWar
Journalists and geo-strategists call it a "frozen conflict" - one of several
such deadlocked disputes under tenuous ceasefire in the post-Soviet states.
Only now, the long-standing battle between Armenia and Azerbaijan over
Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) is anything but. For the third time since the
Russian-brokered 22-year armed-truce - ending a bloody 1988-94 war that
claimed some 30,000 lives - broke down in 2016, the antagonists are at it
again. Yet this outbreak feels different, far bigger, with an ambitious
Azerbaijan seemingly intent on cracking the whole stalemate wide open.
Indeed, Baku's bellicose rhetoric has drifted towards that ever-disturbing
language of "final settlements," "Karabakh is ours," and of a
"life-and-death war" - befitting the "blitzkrieg" intensity of the Azeri
strike.
Those of us in the nerdy-niche tribe of NK-watchers would argue this latest
bloodshed shouldn't have surprised anyone. Still, almost everyone was. Thus
far, through five full days of intense fighting, scores of soldiers and
civilians have been killed and neither side wants to back down. Worse yet,
one generic - and perceptibly inexpert - mainstream press report after
another has emphasized that the recent violence could "draw in" outside
powers like Russia and Turkey. Some have postulated a "worst case scenario"
of "all-out war" between the two.
That's a pretty darn bold assertion, of questionable veracity, especially
when delivered so reflexively and downright casually - plus usually absent
context or caveat. These contentions are inherently problematic because they
assume a Russian-role that isn't so stark, and simplify a Turkish posture
that's indeed worrisome, but highly complicated. The whole media picture
creates - as it tends to - a conflict-caricature that divines nefarious
nemeses-hands behind every dispute and views every challenge through proxy
war prisms. Could this be but a mirror of our own meddling?
Let's get a few things out of the way up front. The unfrozen conflict in
Nagorno-Karabakh is not, and has never been, a vital interest to the United
States. Even rather establishment American think tanks have admitted as
much. Despite its Christian Armenian, and Muslim Azeri antagonists, this
isn't one of the "clashes of civilizations" Professor Samuel Huntington
predicted back when the conflict was in full gear. After all, Armenia's
Christian co-religionist Georgian neighbor has hardly been a friend - having
assisted U.S. and Muslim Azeri efforts to bypass Armenian territory with
Caspian oil and gas pipelines, and recently conducted trilateral military
exercises with Azerbaijan and Turkey.
It also didn't begin as, and has rarely been, a classic proxy war. All
interested global and regional parties - yes, even Russia and Iran - have
generally demonstrated restraint, hedged bets, and maintained links with
both sides. Nor is Nagorno-Karabakh a microcosm of Russian-Western
confrontation; in fact, it "falls outside this stereotype." However
imperfectly, Europe, America, Russia, and other regional actors have more
often than not cooperated to negotiate and maintain the NK-armistices.
In other words, as one comprehensive analysis correctly posited, the
"combination of structural distinctiveness and geographic remoteness has
made the Nagorno Karabakh (NK) conflict conceptually and strategically
peripheral." To translate from the think-tankery: America doesn't really
have a dog in this fight. Unless it decides it does - which it's apt to do,
especially in this madcap moment. Yet if, and I fear when, Washington makes
this about us, and our troubles with those wretched Russkies, matters will
only worsen.
In other words, lesson one of recent American Foreign Policy 101.
Bad History: Long Memories and Intractable Backstory
Don't tell a pundit or a politician now, but when wading into regional
ruckus - it usually helps to know at least a few things about the thing.
That ought include the relevant backstory, even - maybe especially - if, as
the conflict-acquainted journalist Bill Keller once observed: "The Karabakh
conflict taught me that we need a statute of limitations on history." Damned
if he couldn't have said the same about Lebanon, Iraq, the Balkans, or heck
- the American Civil War. Nevertheless, even contested pasts - both Armenian
and Azeri leaders deny documented communal massacres and peddle in
conspiracy theories - matter more than a mite. Here's an abridged "idiot's
guide" to a conflict hardly any policy players have heard of, and even few
scholars want to touch:
For at least 150 years now, ethnic Armenian Christians held hefty majorities
in the more mountainous ("Nagorno" in Russian, language of the pre-1991
imperial masters) bit of the Karabakh (aptly meaning "black garden" in
Turkish, language of that other interested regional actor) district in the
South Caucasus. In 1805, Tsarist Russia conquered the region, including all
of what's now Armenia and Azerbaijan. Divide and conquer, pitting different
ethnic and religious groups against one another to maintain order through
designed instability was this - and most all - imperium's ruling tool of
choice. So too it was with the new Soviet Empire "of the proletariat" after
the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.
It was in the gradual and contested consolidation of communist control - and
the ensuing intra-Soviet politics over proceeding decades - that established
the framework for the current NK-conflict. Initially, in 1920-21, things
looked to be swinging in the direction of Armenia and self-determination for
Nagorno-Karabakh's people. Unfortunately for them, the Azeri's had then been
more amenable to communism and the precarious USSR hoped to placate the new
Armenian-hating Turkish republic of Kemal Ataturk to earn a desperately
needed ally. That didn't pan out, but the new Soviet commissar for
nationalities, Josef Stalin (yes, that Stalin) reneged and established NK as
an autonomous Oblast within the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR).
Despite occasional ethnic strife - often smothered by ample Soviet troops -
that unhappy arrangement held for some 65 years.
However, this lengthy backstory aside, it's vital to recall that - contra
modern Western orientalist assumptions - over the centuries the mixed
Armenian-Azeri communities in the Karabakh region generally cohabited
peacefully. In that sense, they track the experience of Mideast Sunnis and
Shia, whose conflict is hardly as ancient and hopelessly intractable as most
Americans assume. Nagorno-Karabakh's current ethno-religious (emphasis on
the ethnic) dispute - like the Muslim World's intra-confessional divide - is
mainly a modern affair. Both were reignited by recent geopolitical contexts
and catalysts. For NK that meant, however lamentably, the unintended effects
of the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, and his Glasnost - or
"opening" - political and social reforms in the late-1980s. (To review, this
means that Washington's recent tack towards the Azeri position not only
places the US at odds with its supposed commitment to self-determination,
but on the side of Stalin's ghost over Gorbachev's living legacy - isn't
that fun?)
The lid blew off in 1988, when Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenian-super-majority
sought independence from Azerbaijan. After its defeat in the Afghan War, and
given Gorbachev's newly peaceful proclivity, the Soviet Army hadn't the
stomach for its mass-suppression standard and mostly left the local
antagonists to fight it out. The ensuing six-year war resulted in 25-30,000
deaths, about a million displaced persons, and with the Armenians in control
of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven additional adjoining sub-regions - in total,
nearly 20 percent of young Azerbaijan's territory.
Both sides engaged in atrocities, particularly mass expulsions and ethnic
cleansing. Large-scale combat stopped in 1994 with a Russian-brokered
ceasefire, but neither side accepted the status quo and international
settlement efforts like the tri-chaired - Russia, America, and France -
Minsk Group barely moved the needle. Nevertheless, despite semi-regular -
but usually short - violent outbursts, the Russian-orchestrated truce
basically held for 22 years. It's not that any permanent resolution was
forthcoming, but the absence of war was an accomplishment in itself.
So what changed by 2016 - when in the "Four-Day War" Azerbaijan recaptured
small parcels of territory and at least 200 people were killed - and
especially during the run-up to the current combat in Nagorno-Karabakh?
Well, three key things, actually. Specifically, the machinations of three
"mad men."
Mad Man #1: An emboldened Aliyev's opportunistic blitzkrieg.
First, Baku's strategic calculus: the reality, and Azerbaijani perception,
of a growing power and military mismatch with weaker Armenia. That plus
Aliyev's not incorrect sense that the lingering status quo would ultimately
favor its enemy. In international affairs too, it seems possession is often
nine-tenths of the law, and the facts-on-the-ground benefit Armenia's de
facto occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and seven other Azeri-majority
districts it won in battle during the 1988-94 war. Time isn't on Aliyev's
side, diplomatically, so he decided on a game changer. Say what you want
about this scion of Azerbaijan's mini-Stalinist autocratic dynasty, but -
like his daddy Heydar - Ilkham Aliyev sure (thinks he) can read a regional
room.
There's always been an implicit - if initially unrealized - potential power
gap between these two small countries fighting for a Caucasus sliver the
size of Rhode Island. It begins with raw population numbers: 9.9 million
Azeris versus 2.9 million Armenians, or almost a 3.5-to-one ratio. Their
respective military arsenals are also increasingly mismatched. Azerbaijan's
defense expenditures now hover between $2 to $3.5 billion annually - in
2014, for example, it spent $3.43 on its military, compared to just $458
million by Armenia, about 7.5-to-one. Baku also imported 20 times more arms
than Armenia from 2012-16.
In the interest (initially) of shaving off some of Baku's Caspian energy
supplies, and (then) contain arch-rival Iran to its south, Washington has
disproportionately upped its security-sector investments to favor
Azerbaijan. Most recently, Trump's taken the gap to obscene levels,
bolstering Baku's aid from about $3 million in 2016-17 to some $100 million
in 2018-19. Armenia, on the other hand, received just $4.2 million in US
security assistance in 2018 - or about a 25-to-one ratio. In other words,
official Washington can protest its NK-neutrality to the high heavens but -
unlike Russia's relatively balanced arms bonanza with both - America arms
one side to the teeth at the expense of the other, then feigns ignorance and
shock when its favored party puts all that "Made in the U.S.A." gear to good
use.
As a not irrelevant side note: there's also a corruption gap between the two
antagonists. While neither is a particularly free or open society, the
current Transparency International Index ranks Armenia as 77th out of 198,
and America's vaguely favored friend Azerbaijan at 126th on the same list.
In another odd twist, Shia Muslim Azerbaijan (along with Iran and Bahrain,
one of the few majority-Shiite nation-states) has long consorted, conspired,
and traded arms with Israel - not a bad big brother to have in a fight. In
the last few battles, the Azeris have even slammed Israeli-supplied suicide
kamikaze drones into Armenian positions. Overall, Baku is the third-largest
purchaser of Israeli arms, buying a cool $137 million's worth in 2017 alone.
Furthermore, Aliyev's aggression may be geared for domestic edification.
Amidst the economic turmoil of waning energy prices and popular frustration
with his dynastic corruption, he's whipped up nationalist revanchism - a
move right out of the strongman's playbook. Look back to the language. On
Sunday, Aliyev called "settlement" of the NK-conflict "our historic duty,"
so that "the Azerbaijani people are satisfied." He is no doubt partly
responding to the thousands of angry Azeri citizens who poured into Baku's
streets in July, demanding the government mobilize the army wage war on
Armenia. Azeri police had to arrest several protesters to tamp down this
popular outburst.
In fact, though both sides profess obligatory innocence, Azerbaijan probably
started the current combat. It's no accident that a researcher at Germany's
Bremen University said of the recent Azeri offensive: "This is a blitzkrieg,
of course." Also, given the order of battle, weapons employed, and intensity
of the assault, it appears Baku has likely planned the attack for years. For
example, it bears noting that Baku threatened to target Armenia's nuclear
power plant back in July.
Of course, even beset with internal insecurity, economic instability, and
not-easily bottled popular jingoism, Khan Aliyev II might not have gone into
full conqueror-mode without the presumed - and/or actual - promise of more
Turkish support than usual. Enter President [now nearly for-life] Recep
Tayip Erdogan, head of NATO's second-largest army and perhaps the most
madcap meddler of all.
Mad Man #2: Sultan Erdogan and NATO fracture.
Another favored regional (among Ankara's enemies) and Western media trope
these days is Erdogan's neo-Ottoman angle - the idea that the strongman
seeks a rebirth of the old empire: to make Turkey great again! TAGA, anyone?
Some of this is overblown - confusing capacity with aspiration. Still,
there's something to Erdogan's delusions of grandeur. Turkish troops invaded
and persistently patrol northern Syria, and it both bombs and deploys its
private mercenary army in Libya. Erdogan's ambition outruns his actual
capabilities or strategic competence, but his authoritarian
hyper-nationalist chauvinism ensures that it is a different sort of Turkey
approaching Nagorno-Karabakh's latest outbreak. Ankara under this sultan has
demonstrably drifted away from NATO Europe, and towards the Greater Levant
and Central Asia. This doesn't bode well for a South Caucasus conflict.
Thus, according to a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group,
"Turkey is definitely a wild card in any escalation."
Some of Ankara's bias is perhaps natural: Azeris are ethically and
linguistically Turkic. They share common cultures and historical memories of
nomadic steppe-horsemen greatness. Yet the ties of blood and native tongues
only go so far. Though halting and regionally uneven, Turkey's Russia
rapprochement has also been real. Though Ankara and Moscow do, in fact, back
opposing sides in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, they've also maintained
trade ties, cut natural gas deals and Turkey even angered the US by buying
Russian antiaircraft missiles.
Though Baku denies it, Armenian foreign ministry spokesmen have claimed
Turkish "military experts" - and perhaps even Ankara-paid Syrian mercenaries
- are fighting alongside Azerbaijani troops this time around. On Tuesday,
Armenia alleged that a Turkish fighter jet shot down one of its planes,
killing the pilot - though Ankara denied it. So far, much of that may be a
stretch but it's hardly outside the realm of possibility. After all, this
year Turkey shipped 5,000 such Syrian soldiers of fortune to turn the Libyan
tide in favor of its favored faction in that civil war (incidentally,
Russian hired guns from the Wagner Group fight on the other side). While an
overt Turkish military intervention, or attack on its eastern Armenian
neighbor, still seems unlikely, Ankara is more liable than ever to escalate
and catalyze conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Again, look too to Erdogan's language - which disturbingly tracks the Azeri
line. Early this week, he spoke of Armenia's "occupation" of NK, and said it
was time for the dispute "to be put to an end." Talk of final solutions to
frozen conflicts rarely end well.
In case any further proof was needed that a utility-diminishing NATO has all
but reached its breaking point, on Wednesday, French President Emmanuel
Macron blamed Erdogan's "warlike" rhetoric for removing "Azerbaijan's
inhibitions in reconquering Nagorno-Karabakh." These two ostensible NATO
brethren have traded insults - after their navies nearly came to blows off
Libya's coast this July - calling each other, and perhaps the whole Atlantic
Alliance "brain-dead." Both may be right.
Then there's the minor matter that in backing Turkey - in NK especially -
America sides with a government full of official genocide deniers. Remember,
part of the reason for all those fraught ties between Ankara and Yerevan is
that the Turks still won't fess up to displacing, starving, and killing a
million odd Armenians during the First World War. It's a deeply held
non-culpability delusion: in 2016, a Turkish exchange officer in a strategy
class at Fort Leavenworth nearly tore my head off when I politely nudged him
on the subject. (Incidentally, he soon left the course and sought asylum in
the US after Erdogan stymied a suspicious coup-attempt that July - fearing
himself among the many military personas non grata in its wake.)
Mad Man #3: The boys in Washington and their imaginary Russian-monster
friend.
Finally, the world family's crazy curmudgeonly Uncle, Sam, is more of a
wildcard than at any time in three plus decades of NK-strife. Washington
styles itself the foremost "honest broker" for global conflicts; but it's
almost never that. Ever heard of Palestine? However, as Nagorno-Karabakh has
shown, even the most tangential and distant discord belies America's
professed straight-dealing. Ole Sam hasn't met a far-flung fracas in which
he won't take sides, seek personal benefit, accelerate, and
counterproductively catalyze, for quite some time now. And if Washington
catches a whiff of Russia? Well, then it's game on.
The US has long had its vulturous eyes on the region, especially after the
Soviet Union's final collapse in 1991. It still does - more so maybe. As a
student at the Army's Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in 2016-17,
all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning fictitious, but
highly realistic, combat missions in the South Caucasus region. As I recall,
our recurring scenario involved defending Azerbaijan (and, incidentally, its
pipelines and Caspian Basin energy sources) from a northbound attack from a
breakaway statelet of ethnic-Azeri Iranians. We planned, practiced, and
simulated offloading troops, tanks, and supplies at Georgia's Black Sea
ports, through its capital Tbilisi - bypassing Russian and Armenian
territory, and staying clear of the Nagorno-Karabakh third-rail, naturally -
into the frontlines in southern Azerbaijan. Come to think of it, in the
war-game, US forces traced a rather reverse route of the corporate-crafted
BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Turkey) pipeline.must've been a coincidence.
To be fair, my own joint strategy instructor was a thoughtful, sensible guy
who eschewed the mission's potential for grandiosity - always questioning
our ambitions, challenging assumptions, and emphasizing regional tensions
and limitations. In fact, he was the person who first truly peaked my
interest on Nagorno-Karabakh. That said, to my knowledge, he didn't choose
the scenario - and the fact that similar war-games infused the military
world for a couple of decades speaks to the thinking in Washington. And
while Armenia stayed tangential to the CGSC training, it was quite clear
that Azerbaijan was the protected protagonist - invaded by putatively
Iranian factions (and, of course, the Russian menace was always in the air).
All of which reflects an increasingly (if inconsistently) Azeri-friendly US
posture since the late 1990s. Despite the real, but oft-inflated influence
of the Armenian-American Lobby - consider it the Kardashian Factor (Kim has
been weighing-in with a series of tweets) - the Washington winds have been
blowing Baku's way for quite a while. As Antiwar.com's own, the late Justin
Raimondo - a rare NK-watcher - explained during the first major post-truce
explosion in 2016, US policy in the South Caucasus is driven by two main
motives: energy and encirclement [of Russia].
The view from Moscow - and frankly from objective outer space - is clear:
since the late 1990s, the US has geographically (through overt NATO
eastward-expansion) and diplomatically (by denying any legitimacy to
Russia's sphere, or say, in regional affairs) caged-in the Bear. Washington
would've gone far further if its (at a minimum) encouraged "color
revolutions" along Russia's borders - "Rose:" Georgia, 2003; "Orange:"
Ukraine, 2004; "Denim" and "Tulip:" Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, 2005) hadn't
fallen flat, and that pesky Putin hadn't used force in 2008 to keep a rather
aggressive little Georgia from joining NATO. It's only gotten worse since
then, as the entire bipartisan Washington establishment has donned
facts-resistant Russia-alarm goggles, particularly since Donald Trump's
election. Pundits and politicians alike now view every global conflict
through these Moscow-facing lens.
Then there's the money to follow. While its markets, sources, and the US
supply-situation have since diminished certain energy-urgency, Washington
seems stuck in the oil-is-everything past. It was that calculus which, in
the late 1990s, helped push America towards Azeri-amenable positions in the
Caucasus. The key was that BTC pipeline and the announcement by Papa Aliyev
of "the Contract of the Century" - apparently strongmen speak similar
slangs. That centennial deal amounted to an agreement with a consortium of
oil companies - Amoco, Pennzoil, British Petroleum, Unocal, McDermott,
Statoil, Lukoil, and the state-owned Turkish and Saudi enterprises, which
granted them exclusive rights to Azerbaijan's oil and gas reserves.
Adding insult to injury, it's another "inconvenient truth" of his career
that in 1997, now environmentalist-guru and then vice president Al Gore
presided over the White House signing ceremony of four additional Caspian
Sea contracts between Aliyev-senior and US oil giants Exxon, Chevron, Mobil,
and Amoco (which merged with British Petroleum-BP a year later). The deals
were reportedly worth some $8 billion. As it relates to NK, there's one
salient fact to keep in mind: Armenia has no oil reserves to speak of. But
I'm sure that nasty corporate cash would never sway the evenhandedness of
honest Abe's successors in Washington.
Only wait for it: the 2016 burst of NK-combat - what Raimondo dubbed "The
April Fool's War" - was launched by Azerbaijan just as Aliyev-the-Younger
was flying back from Washington. In that meeting, Secretary of State John
Kerry used suspiciously Azeri-inflected language, calling for "an ultimate
resolution" to the decades-old conflict. Kerry's (maybe) unwittingly
incendiary phrasing was absurd, Justin wrote, "because the 'crisis' has
already been resolved" - meaning the facts on the ground support a de facto
independent Nagorno-Karabakh that accords with self-determination, as well
as the world as it is.
No doubt, there are serious outstanding issues and Baku has real grievances:
the expelled NK-Azeris have a right to return and the seven additional
Azeri-majority occupied districts should be handed back to Baku.
Nevertheless, by pretending that there's a solution that involves peaceful
reintegration of Armenian super-majority Nagorno-Karabakh into Azerbaijan,
the US all but green-lights Baku's resort to game-changing conquest.
The Ghost of Woodrow Wilson
At root, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict - and US perceptions of it - comes
down to the seemingly incompatible tension between two geopolitical and
international legal principles: [Armenian] self-determination and
[Azerbaijani] territorial sovereignty. So far, all attempts to square that
circle - in Moscow, Brussels, and various international bodies - have
failed. Washington, though, has barely tried - especially since the
energy-crazy late-1990s and the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Funny, isn't it, how inconsistently various American administrations have
applied the self-determination principle pronounced by President Woodrow
Wilson in January 1918? Not that Wilson evenly applied his own policy either
(Just ask anti-imperialists like Mao or Ho Chi Minh how they faredat the
Versailles Peace Conference). In fact, from the first, contradictory
commitment to popular sovereignty was an American trademark: you can talk to
a Kurd, or a Palestinian, or some Kashmiris about that. Furthermore, since
the fall of the USSR, the US and a compliant West treat the synthetic
post-Soviet state borders - Justin called Azerbaijan a "Soviet fiction,
created by Stalin," back in 1999 - as inerrant gospel only when its suits
them.
Take just a few examples: Kosovar Albanians - possessed with remarkably
similar arguments as the NK-Armenians, by the way - apparently deserved to
carve an independent state out of Serbia. In fact, the US Air Force went to
war on behalf of the rather checkered Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the
late Clinton-era. Yet, Russian-friendly Abkhazian or South Ossetian
minorities - who want out of post-Soviet Georgia - or even locals voting for
autonomy or outside-accession in Nagorno Karabakh (1991) or Crimea (2014)?
Nah, Uncle Sam says they have no inherent right to self-determine or choose
which state they live in. Their borders are inalterable, see.
To Washingtonians, the degree of popular sovereignty rights all depends
which way the people in question are perceived to lean - East or West, so to
speak. Even inconsistency can be consistent.
Still, Russia doesn't deserve most of the rancor it receives regarding
Nagorno-Karabakh. Despite having a military base in Armenia and the country
being a signatory to the Russian-led NATO-facsimile Collective Security
Treaty Organization (CSTO), Moscow isn't terribly close to Yerevan on this
issue. While some claim "Armenia has become a pawn in the Kremlin's
geopolitical games," because Russia convinced Armenia to scuttle an
association agreement with the European Union (and instead join the Eurasian
Economic Union, a Moscow-led free-trade bloc). Predictably, few Westerners
bother ask why Armenia should be tied to the EU - it's not even located in
Europe.
Besides, the lukewarm relationship is reciprocated. Indeed, Russia's
responsible hedging behavior during the NK conflicts has, according to the
director of a think tank in Yerevan, engendered "a justified Armenian
perception of questionable and unreliable backing from Russia in the event
the current fighting expands." That's understandable, given that the
spokesman for the supposedly neo-imperial-obsessed Kremlin said Monday that
"[they] are not talking now about military options."
Still, make no mistake: on its merits, Nagorno-Karabakh has not - and need
not - be a classic proxy war. This isn't Libya or Syria - though Turkish,
and/or American interventions could help make it so.
For their part, America's favorite bad boys - Russia and Iran - have
generally shown remarkable restraint in Nagorno-Karabakh, past and present.
The former has quickly called on both sides to "immediately halt fire and
begin talks to stabilize the situation." One might assume the latter would
back its co-religionist Shia Muslims in Azerbaijan; or conversely, that Iran
- pushed ever closer to Moscow by U.S. enmity - would tack towards Russia's
treaty-allied Armenians. Yet Tehran has rarely come down strongly on either
side.
Few observers, even among the more aggressive Iran hawks, realize that the
Islamic Republic is hardly a homogenous state. Perhaps 20 percent of its
people are ethnically Azeri; which at 10-15 million souls is greater than
the total population of Azerbaijan. Yet, lest one assume that instantly
translates into support for Baku, in fact Persian-dominated Tehran tends to
fear its occasionally restive Azeri minority and resents its northern
neighbor's amenability to Israeli encirclement of their embattled Islamic
Republic. Furthermore, Iran - like Armenia and (mostly) Russia - was notably
excluded from the U.S.-organized Azeri oil consortium.
That doesn't mean Tehran necessarily pivots to Christian Armenia either;
rather, that its response to the latest fighting has basically been balanced
and circumspect. During the smaller July outbreak of violence, one of its
senior diplomats said only that "Iran supports a peaceful solution," - that
while "we support the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.we are interested
in resolving the issue through dialogue in favor of Azerbaijan.when it comes
to war and military conflict, we do not agree at all with this subject and
prefer to maintain the status quo."
Hardly words commensurate with the "Mad Mullahs" of American imaginations.
Meanwhile, on Monday, that supposed Moscow-mule of an American president,
Donald J. Trump, simply said of the current NK-outbreak, "We're looking at
it very strongly.We'll see if we can stop it."
Trump is hardly a geostrategic whiz - one doubts he'd ever heard tell of
Nagorno-Karabakh. Still, like it (or him) or not, in this case his
perfunctory, and somewhat dismissive, realism inadvertently reflects what's
what. Sad indeed, that it takes a foreign policy sub-neophyte like The
Donald to put his finger on what's at stake and what's not for the US in NK;
to denote the limits of American power, interests, and investment in this
Caucasus backwater. But it is what it is.
In Nagorno-Karabakh, count me highly Hippocratic: "primum non
nocere"."first, do no harm."
