The harsh lessons of Nagorno-Karabakh

Azerbaijan just won what is possibly the final round in its 45-year-long war with Armenia, leading to the dissolution of an Armenian self-proclaimed state in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.

The land had been occupied by Armenia since it started the 1988-1994 bloody conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan. When the fighting ended, 20 percent of Azerbaijani territory was occupied by Armenia. The current reversal may be a decisive victory for Azerbaijan, the repercussions of which go a long way beyond the strategic Caucasus region, and must be studied in Washington and other world capitals.

First, this is a blow to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Armenia was a member of the Moscow-led Common Security Treaty Organization, a mutual defense pact. Russia, deeply involved in its war against Ukraine, did not muster the will or the resources to come to defense of the Armenian Christians, despite the presence of Russian peacekeepers in and around Karabakh. Putin has thus undermined, possibly fatally, the 200-year-long alliance with the Armenians, which led them to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives fighting the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and the 20th century.

Armenia was perceived until recently as a client state of Russia, but Putin has much bigger geopolitical fish to fry in his diplomatic dance with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the recently re-elected President of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman leader. Erdogan detests Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan. In 2018, the popularly elected Pashinyan removed the Putin stooges who used to rule in Yerevan, leading a peaceful popular uprising against them that became known as the “velvet revolution” — and leaving Moscow furious.

Pashinyan and many in the Armenian elite, disappointed with perceived Russian abandonment, would like to reorient the country towards the West. Recently, Armenia started to train its military with U.S., and plans are afoot to ratify the Rome Statute, a key step toward including Armenia as a member of the International Criminal Court. This, in turn, might make Putin’s arrest for war crimes theoretically possible should he visit Armenia.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan has emerged as an undisputed regional hegemon of the South Caucasus and an important friend and ally of Erdogan. With a population of 10 million — bigger than neighboring Georgia and Armenia combined — secular, Turkic and Shiite Muslim Azerbaijan now has a battle-hardened army, paid for with oil and gas revenues, trained and equipped by Turkey and Israel, that can stand up to its smaller and weaker neighbors.

Azerbaijan forced Armenia to relinquish Nagorno-Karabakh, resulting in the exodus of 100,000 people — most of its Armenian population — and now can press for another strategic goal: opening the Zangezur Corridor through Armenian territory, thus connecting Azerbaijan to the exclave of Nakhchivan, birthplace of the ruling Aliyev family. This would further connect Turkey with Azerbaijan and the Turkic Central Asian countries on the other side of the Caspian Sea: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Erdogan’s ambition to consolidate the Turkic world appears closer to reality than ever.

Russia was not alone in sitting out the current bout of fighting. Iran, while supportive of Armenia, did not intervene to sustain Nagorno-Karabakh. Though the anti-Azerbaijani rhetoric of the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran is loud, its actions were limited to declarations of “red lines.”

The West, rhetorically a friend of Christian and democratic Armenia, didn’t lift a finger on this issue aside from voicing the usual concerns about human rights violations. Past U.S. direct efforts to settle the conflict failed. The Minsk Group, which aimed to solve the conflict and was co-chaired by the U.S., France and Russia, also proved unable to convince the sides to accept a diplomatic solution that would keep Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh under Azerbaijani sovereignty — something Baku accepted for decades, but Armenia rejected, hoping to keep the territory purged of Azerbaijanis.

The Armenian diasporas in the U.S., France, and Russia failed to deliver the arms, money and political protection Armenia needed to keep Karabakh, or even to keep Armenians in Karabakh, despite multi-decades of effort, and many millions of dollars spent. Great powers beat weak diasporas. Lesson learned.

The U.N. did not send an observer mission to Nagorno-Karabakh until most Armenian refugees had left their homes. As usual, the U.N. did too little, too late.

Money talks. Energy talks louder. Europe has considerable interests in Azerbaijani oil and gas supplies, which partially replace embargoed Russian hydrocarbons. Azerbaijan’s massive off-shore Caspian energy production — including the thousand-mile-long, one-million-barrels-a-day Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to the Mediterranean, and the Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline — convincingly demonstrate that realpolitik plays a dominant role in today’s European security. And the fact that secular Azerbaijan provides a small but important countervailing political value against the theocratic dictatorship in Tehran may also have something to do with the muted Western reaction.

The outcome of the recent hostilities suggests that in a world where Russia, China and the U.S. are disrupting the international system, committed actors like Azerbaijan and regional powers like Turkey outperform and can achieve strategic successes. Instruments of diplomacy and international organizations that require good will and cooperation suffer setbacks and may be mothballed until better times.

Unprotected refugees suffer, and the world is moving on. Military power and coalitions with strong allies win wars and define peace as they have for centuries. The world may appear brutal, because it is, but it is better for our policymakers to look reality in the eye.

Ariel Cohen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. He is a leading expert in Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East and the author of “Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis.” He is also a managing director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program at the International Tax and Investment Center.