In 2020, Azerbaijan launched a surprise attack on the Armenian-governed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In 2023, after a devastating blockade, it completed its conquest, ethnically cleansing 120,000 Armenian residents and then dynamiting the regional parliament lest the real democracy it represented spread into Azerbaijan. When Yuri Kim, the acting assistant secretary of state, told the U.S. Senate, “We will not tolerate any attack on the people of Nagorno-Karabakh,” she lied.
Behind the scenes, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan saw an opportunity. With Azerbaijani unilateralism returning Nagorno-Karabakh to Baku’s control, Blinken and Sullivan believed there was no longer any real impediment to peace in the South Caucasus. Though President Joe Biden considered himself a foreign policy expert and his team entered office promising both “diplomacy is back” and the “adults are back in charge,” his initial foreign policy legacy was a disaster.
At the Anchorage summit with China, Blinken and Sullivan looked like deer caught in the headlights as their Chinese counterparts berated them. Botching the Afghanistan withdrawal humiliated the United States and cost American lives. Fear defined the U.S. response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as Blinken initially urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to flee and then refused key weaponry. Not even Foreign Affairs’ whitewashing bravado about how he brought quiet to the Middle East could reverse the Biden administration’s mishandling of the region both before and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
For the Biden team, winning peace in the South Caucasus could be a triumph to rescue its legacy and reverse its record. Behind the scenes, Biden’s team put the hard press on Armenia, the weaker state, to make further concessions. Perhaps officials believed the price would be worth it if peace ended the conflict, or perhaps they did not care so long as they could claim victory. They were either naive or cynical. Either way, they misunderstood the root of the conflict.
Azerbaijan’s hostility toward Armenia was never the result of the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute; that was just the excuse Baku offered to generations of Western diplomats. Rather, Azerbaijan’s rejection was rooted both in ideology and the need for successive Azerbaijani presidents to distract their populace from their failings and corruption. In essence, there has been no difference between Presidents Heydar and Ilham Aliyev’s diatribes against Armenia and those of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s polemics against Israel.
This is why the present is so dangerous. Now that Azerbaijan has seized Nagorno-Karabakh, its role as a fig leaf is gone. Aliyev has a choice: peace or war footing. His backtracking on the deals Blinken and Sullivan made, his endless demands for new concessions, his continued military aggression against Armenia proper, and now his claims to all Armenia as “Western Azerbaijan” reflect a man who both sees Armenians as illegitimate and a leader that lives in terror of his own people now recognizing his exploitation and mismanagement.
TULSI GABBARD SHOULD RELEASE INTELLIGENCE ABOUT AZERBAIJAN’S LOOMING WAR
Simply put, Aliyev may make additional demands and the Armenian government may even accede to some, but neither the Armenian government nor Western diplomats can avert further Azerbaijani aggression. For Aliyev, it is a matter of his own survival. If he can win short-term concessions through diplomacy, these are not Armenian sacrifices on the road to peace but rather triumphs he can pocket to make his end goal simpler. War is likely.
None of this means that peace is impossible, but there are no shortcuts. For peace to triumph, it must be peace made between two democracies, not one democracy and one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships. There must first be a government in Azerbaijan that represents its people rather than exploits them. To ignore this reality is not to advance peace but to cost tens of thousands of lives and lose forever centuries-old cultural heritage at best, and make peace unattainable at worst. Rather than encourage endless talks, the best way for the United States and Europe to advance peace in the Caucasus will be to shed moral equivalence, sanction Aliyev, and prioritize democracy rather than coddle dictatorship.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.