The best outcome from the Iran conflict? Peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Two major conflicts – Ukraine and Iran – are creating seismic upheaval in the tightly meshed world of post-Cold War alliances around the world. The biggest losers in this lethal game of musical chairs will likely be smaller nations who can no longer rely on the protection and patronage of greater powers whose priorities have been radically realigned.
The immediate result is a panicked race to seek new partners, a desperate rush of diplomatic blind dating in which those newly exposed smaller countries have very few cards to play other than to make painful concessions. This week's meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan of Armenia – the first ever official bi-lateral visit between the heads of these two countries is a case in point.
Armenia has for decades turned its back on two of its immediate neighbours – Turkey and its ally Azerbaijan, with closed frontiers and no diplomatic relations. That has only been possible because of Yerevan's ability to depend on two other major regional powers – Iran to the south and Russia to the north. Those alliances created a confidence which translated into a fatal overreach when Armenia, three decades ago, invaded Azerbaijan and occupied a fifth of the Azerbaijani territory of Karabakh, forcibly expelling some 800,000 Azerbaijanis and establishing a mono-ethnic Armenian state.
For a generation, Azerbaijan's attempts to regain its territory through negotiation and diplomacy, despite resounding support for their sovereign rights over Karabakh from the UN Security Council, came to nothing. Russia, the former colonial power, could always be relied on to preserve the frozen conflict in ways which maintained Moscow's grip on its 'near abroad'. Then came 2020. In that year cross-border tit for tat between the two neighbours became a full-blown 44-day conflict, with Azerbaijan liberating much of Armenian-occupied territory. In 2023 what was not returned three years earlier was finally secured by Azerbaijan. To Yerevan's utter dismay, in both 2020 and 2023 its long-standing patron and formal military ally in the Kremlin was nowhere to be seen. Russia's Western imperial ambitions had exhausted its ability to maintain its old role of Caucasian puppet master to the south. Armenia was left to sink or swim.
Azerbaijan's combat victories, cemented with a ceasefire but still today without a peace treaty, can be read as definitive proof that Russia had left the stage as far as Armenia was concerned. That might have led Pashinyan to seek urgent reconciliation with Turkey. Instead, Yerevan doubled down on its relationship with its one remaining regional protector, Iran. Arguably he had no option: decades of virulent anti-Turkish domestic and international rhetoric would probably have made any pro-Ankara realignment fatal to his own government at that point. And why risk alienating your one remaining powerful friend, Iran, by reaching out to its long-standing opponent Turkey?
Just as the Ukraine war provoked one crisis for Armenia, the Iran war has provoked a second. But this time Iran's troubles and dramatically exposed weakness, with the Islamic Republic itself now friendless in a world where its ally Assad has fallen and the leverage of its proxy Houthi, Hezbollah and Hamas militias has been decimated, have left Yerevan not with one but with zero dependable allies. Even Armenia's ability to call on its once powerful diaspora lobby groups in the US and France is no longer a realistic strategy in today's climate, given the deeply problematic Iran connection.
This is the sequence of events which has left Armenia with literally nowhere to turn but Ankara. Pashinyan, an intelligent politician who has shown some ability to negotiate within the desperately narrow space afforded by the tensions of geopolitical reality and domestic nationalist opinion, will need every ounce of skill to emerge from the current talks with a result which has both substance and domestic credibility.
For now, concessions – if he is wise to take them – are his best card. Turkey will not contemplate normalisation of still less supportive friendship with Armenia unless Yerevan formally commits to a peace deal with Azerbaijan. The country's President Ilham Aliyev has long maintained such a peace deal needs to entail a rewriting of the Armenian constitution to remove extra-territorial claims on Azerbaijan's internationally recognised sovereign territory, the establishment of a formal right to return of Azerbaijanis expelled from Armenia during the break-up of the Soviet Union, and agreement on a land corridor through Armenia (would earn huge income) enabling Azerbaijan and countries from Asia the swiftest land route to Europe. Some in Armenia will see these as too painful to concede. Wiser heads will see them for what they are: economic and diplomatic opportunities to move forward after over three decades of conflict.
If Pashinyan can take this unpalatable medicine – and if by some miracle he can sell it to his electorate, Armenia stands to benefit. A chance of establishing new partnerships with more reliable neighbours, the enormous benefits of regional economic and energy integration after decades of impoverished isolation, a chance in fact for normalisation, peace and prosperity. The alternative is too foolhardy to contemplate.