The Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) is dedicated to educating Congressional, military and civilian national security decision-makers on American defense and strategic interests, primarily in the Middle East, the cornerstone of which is a robust U.S.-Israeli security cooperation. JINSA believes that a strong American military and national security posture is the best guarantor of peace and the survival of our values and civilization.

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On Oct. 14, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov proposed that Russian peacekeepers or observers should be deployed to halt the current conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, which broke out into open hostilities in late September. Yet, there’s good reason for the West to be wary of this idea. Russian peacekeepers would do nothing to resolve the conflict, and only serve to give Moscow another lever through which to pressure both Armenia and Azerbaijan, thus undermining the corridor across the South Caucasus linking Europe with Central Asia.

In the past two weeks, several hundred people (including dozens of civilians) have been killed on both sides of the renewed conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority-Armenian enclave inside internationally recognized Azerbaijani territory. The conflict has risked triggering the involvement of Russia, Turkey and Iran. Given its proximity to Europe, quelling it has understandably become a high priority, and the need for international intervention is overdue.

The problem is that Russian peacekeepers would violate the first principle of the Hippocratic oath: “Do no harm.” For 30 years, Moscow has sought to manipulate the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict to its advantage, and the experience that neighboring countries have had with Russian peacekeepers should serve as a strong deterrent.

The Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict is unique in many ways — including the fact that no peacekeepers have ever been deployed along the line of contact between the two armies. This is no accident. Back in 1994, Moscow negotiated a ceasefire between the two parties that ended the “hot” phase of their war. But as international organizations sought to mount a peacekeeping mission, Russia insisted it would take part. This, of course, would violate United Nations peacekeeping guidelines, which insist that neighboring countries should never serve as peacekeepers. And because no other country felt safe sending peacekeepers where Russian troops would be present, no peacekeeping mission ever materialized.

Interestingly, this is one of the few things that both Armenia and Azerbaijan have ever agreed on. Back in 1994, both quietly opposed any deployment of Russian forces into the conflict. The reason was simple: Both knew better than anyone how Moscow had manipulated this conflict from the start. This was true in Soviet times, when Moscow supported Azerbaijan against a wayward Armenia. It was even more true after independence, when Moscow shifted to support Armenia when a nationalist president was elected in Azerbaijan.

Moscow’s behavior in recent years does not indicate that much has changed. In what must be a first in international mediation, Russia is, on one hand, a co-chair of the international body tasked with mediating the conflict — the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Simultaneously, however, Russia has been providing large amounts of weaponry to both parties in the conflict. The main difference? Armenia, a member of the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, has paid next to nothing for these weapons, whereas independent-minded and oil-rich Azerbaijan has paid world market prices.

In the past 30 years, the track record of Russian peacekeepers has given birth to a witticism: Russian peacekeeping is all about keeping the pieces. If Armenia and Azerbaijan need any reminders, they can ask their common neighbor, Georgia. Before the 2008 Russian invasion of that country, Russian peacekeepers in the Georgian breakaway territory of South Ossetia were engaged in the training and organization of paramilitary forces in that territory, which subsequently triggered the conflict by shelling Georgian villages. Russia then invaded Georgia, and now has more than 3,000 troops inside South Ossetia.

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has signaled Armenia’s willingness to consider Russian peacekeepers. This is understandable, given Armenia’s setbacks in the current fighting. But Mr. Pashinyan should be careful: The deployment of Russian peacekeepers could, in practice, lead to Russian administration over Nagorno-Karabakh, the very territory Armenia is fighting for.

This may seem outlandish today. Yet back in 1989, when the troubles started, the Soviet regime for some time applied direct administration over Nagorno-Karabakh. Only last year, that model was resuscitated by Modest Kolerov, a former adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the head of the Gazprom-affiliated Regnum news agency.

Mr. Kolerov claimed that Nagorno-Karabakh faced either incorporation into Armenia or military conquest by Azerbaijan. Neither option, he argued, would provide the territory with its purported right to a “dignified state existence.” His solution was for Nagorno-Karabakh to have a form of statehood under Russian tutelage, outside either Armenia or Azerbaijan — something similar, perhaps, to that of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, or Transnistria in Moldova.

Mr. Lavrov’s suggestion of Russian peacekeepers may very well be the first step in applying the Kolerov model to Nagorno-Karabakh — something that would freeze the conflict and give Moscow enormous influence over both Armenia and Azerbaijan. This is not the way forward. It has been clear for years that the festering conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh was primed to explode sooner or later, and Western policy shares part of the blame, not least because it has tolerated Russia’s role as a co-mediator while Moscow has simultaneously been manipulating the conflict. Simply put, Russian policies are a key reason for the violence we are witnessing presently. A greater Russian role is therefore definitely not the solution.

What, then, is? The conflict requires a serious international effort that aspires not only to freeze the conflict anew, but to resolve it once and for all. This can only be achieved by a joint U.S. and EU effort that combines American hard power to provide security, and the EU’s financial clout for the reconstruction of the conflict zone.

Anything less amounts to a dangerous half-measure — and an opening for Moscow.

Svante E. Cornell is the director of the American Foreign Policy Council’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, co-founder of the Institute for Security and Development Policy and a Policy Advisor to JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Strategy.

Originally published in The Washington Times

This op-ed was made possible by the generous support of the Gettler Family Foundation and a portion of the research was conducted on the Benjamin Gettler International Policy Trip.

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Featuring:

Ambassador Elin Suleymanov
Azerbaijan’s Ambassador to the United States

Svante E. Cornell
Policy Advisor, JINSA Gemunder Center

Michael Makovsky, PhD
JINSA President & CEO

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By BoNDeX – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78657027

For the second time in three months, Armenia and Azerbaijan are involved in heavy fighting. To even casual observers of the region, this is nothing new: flareups in this supposedly “frozen” conflict have been commonplace in the past decade. The only problem seems to be that they tend to get worse over time. But reality is much more worrisome. The conflict is all but “frozen.” In the past few years, the entire premise on which the uneasy balance in this conflict rested has essentially been razed, paving the way for a new logic of escalation in which the likelihood of a major war is increasingly obvious.

Much of the coverage of this conflict centers on who started whichever spat. This is largely irrelevant. Much more important are three major changes to the conflict’s underlying logic. The first is the broader erosion of a norms-based international system based on international law and institutions. The second is the merger of the region’s geopolitics with the Middle East. And the third is Armenia’s shift to a revisionist approach to the conflict and negotiations since the 2018 Velvet revolution.

Even prior to these shifts, there was always a major factor of instability in this conflict. The original war in the 1990s saw Armenia, the smaller and poorer of the two countries, coming away with a victory. Exploiting Azerbaijan’s domestic troubles and enjoying Russian support, Armenia did not stay at taking control over the main disputed territory—the mainly Armenian-populated enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Instead, Armenian forces conquered much larger areas to the south and east that were compactly settled with Azerbaijanis. As a result, in the name of protecting 150,000 co-ethnics, Armenian forces drove away over 750,000 people from their homes and occupied over a sixth of Azerbaijan’s territory.

This had two effects. First, it changed the international perception of Armenia from that of a victim to that of an aggressor. Second, it ensured that Azerbaijan would never come to terms with the result of the conflict. Instead, revanchism became a prominent element of the Azerbaijani psyche. When Azerbaijan was able to begin producing large volumes of oil a decade later, it spent a significant amount of this windfall on its military. For several years, Azerbaijan’s defense spending exceeded Armenia’s entire budget, and Azerbaijan’s rhetoric intensified accordingly.

But then there were changes in regional geopolitics. The most prominent shift in the past decade is the gradual weakening of international institutions and international law. Great powers that were once bound by certain norms of behavior now essentially do what they can get away with and engage in various adventures on other countries’ territories, increasingly not bothering to disguise it. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, then annexed Crimea, and invaded Ukraine in 2014. China is unilaterally expanding its control over the South China Sea. Iran, ignoring national boundaries, is building an arc of Shi’a militias from Yemen across Iraq to Syria and Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is meddling in Yemen’s civil war, and Turkey is arming and training militias in Syria and Lebanon. The list goes on. The point is that the main method used to resolve disputes has shifted from international diplomacy to the covert or overt use of force. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in 2019 recognized this shift, commenting that “today, the ‘might is right’ principle prevails in the world. This is a new reality. We must be ready for it.”

This has huge implications for the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, because Baku had built its entire effort to restore its territorial integrity on appeals to international law, and diplomacy in international institutions—albeit with its growing military capability serving as enhanced motivation to change Armenia’s calculus. Over the past few years, however, Baku has come to conclude this policy has reached a dead end. That forces the Azerbaijani leadership either to accept the loss of its territory—an impossible choice in the face of an increasingly nationalistic and revanchist public opinion—or to do something about it. Had the international mechanism to mediate the conflict been functional, things might have been different. But the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Minsk Group, co-chaired by Russia, France and the United States, has done little except shuttling between capitals and holding meetings. The perception that the Minsk Group has degenerated into a process for the sake of process, or an excuse for inaction, is widespread across the region.

The second shift is that in regional geopolitics. For long, the logic of South Caucasus geopolitics was entirely within the post-Soviet logic: Russia’s efforts to dominate the region faced growing Western efforts to open up the corridor to Central Asia across the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. But all this changed in the past decade, with the region’s geopolitics gradually merging with those of the Middle East. This happened for several reasons. The first was America’s gradual disengagement, which began in the late George W. Bush administration but deepened during the Obama era. The second was Russia’s decision to exploit the vacuum Obama created, by making a bid for a key role in the affairs of the Middle East, particularly in Syria. This resulted in a situation where Russia, Turkey and Iran emerged as the key brokers in regional hotspots in the South Caucasus and Syria. Similarly, Turkey and Russia found themselves supporting warring sides in the Libyan conflict.

As a result, the interactions among those powers in Middle Eastern theaters began to affect Armenia and Azerbaijan directly. This was clear already in 2015 when Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet over Syria—and Moscow responded by beefing up its military presence in bases in Armenia near the Turkish border. But as Turkey and Russia have once again fallen out over Syria and Libya, the impact on the region has become even more pronounced. When fighting erupted in July, it happened on the Armenian-Azerbaijani border—far north of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh but very close to the pipeline infrastructure carrying Azerbaijani oil and gas to Turkey. Both Ankara and Baku interpreted this as a Russian-inspired threat against them both. This, in turn, triggered an unprecedented Turkish endorsement of Azerbaijan, including the rapid deployment of Turkish forces for military exercises in Azerbaijan. Turkey, a NATO member, now suggests it may get directly involved in a conflict against Armenia, a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty.

The third and final shift is in Armenia’s approach to the conflict. When Nikol Pashinyan came to power following a Velvet Revolution in 2018, Azerbaijan tacitly welcomed the transition and markedly refrained from taking advantage of Armenia’s internal turmoil on the frontline. Aliyev welcomed the arrival to power, for the first time in twenty years, of an Armenian leadership that did not have its roots in Nagorno-Karabakh even though both Pashinyan’s predecessors hailed from there. Baku seemed to expect that once Pashinyan consolidated power, he would be amenable to work toward a compromise solution to the conflict.

What happened was quite the opposite. Under Pashinyan, Armenia’s position has hardened. In 2019, Pashinyan repudiated the “Madrid Principles,” which have served the basis for negotiations since 2007. Yerevan also sought to change the very format of negotiations, demanding the involvement of the local leadership in Nagorno-Karabakh in the talks. This appeared to be an effort to advance the fiction that Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh are not a united front, flying in the face of the 2015 conclusion of the European Court of Human Rights that Armenia exercises effective control over the territory. Incidentally, it contradicted Pashinyan’s own 2019 statement that Karabakh “is Armenia, and that’s it,” which seemingly removed any space for discussion of the territory’s status. Not staying at that, Armenians began to speak of the occupied territories surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh as “liberated” territories. This was another shift because Armenia had previously indicated it held these territories—historically populated by Azerbaijanis—as bargaining chips that would be returned in a peace deal that would settle the conflict. Defense Minister David Tonoyan’s statement that Armenia rebuked the land-for-peace idea to a strategy pursuing “new wars for new territories” did not help matters. Finally, Armenia’s efforts to resettle ethnic Armenians from Syria and Libya into the occupied territories were a clear effort to create new facts on the ground.

Of course, Azerbaijan has not been passive or blameless. With every year of failed negotiations, Azerbaijani rhetoric threatening a military solution has grown more prominent. In 2016, Azerbaijan actually reasserted control over smaller areas of the occupied territories, in the first meaningful shift of territorial possession since 1994. This certainly appears to have had a powerful effect on Armenian planners and contributed to the more bellicose Armenian rhetoric. Furthermore, the lack of direct contact except occasional top-level meetings ensures that each side interprets the other side’s words in the most ominous way possible, leading to frequent misunderstandings. What is eminently clear is that it is the failure of international efforts to make the negotiations even remotely meaningful that has pushed both sides in an unconstructive direction.

All of these factors have undermined the fragile balance preventing a resumption of full-scale war in the conflict. But strangely, Western powers have seemed to ignore the conflict and the South Caucasus. Over the past two years, the European Union and the United States both released thoughtful and assertive new strategies for Central Asia. That was a welcome step given positive developments in that region and its obvious growing importance in a time when the U.S. government sees “strategic competition” with Eurasian great powers as the key challenge to U.S. national security. What is mystifying is that both the United States and EU appeared to ignore that the South Caucasus is their gateway to Central Asia. Without that gateway, their ambitions of strengthening their presence in the heart of the Eurasian continent may well be moot.

A reason for this inaction is, perhaps, that there are no easy solutions. Getting involved in the South Caucasus implies involvement in highly contentious conflicts—including those in Georgia—that overwhelmed Western powers might prefer to ignore. It also means challenging conventional wisdom. While Westerners have welcomed the domestic reform efforts of Armenia’s new government, which are very real, they seem to have forgotten that a more democratic government does not mean a more peaceful one. In fact, as political scientists like Jack Snyder have long shown, countries in transition to democracy are at the greatest risk of involving themselves in armed conflict, given the government’s need to respond to nationalist sentiments. The fact that Russia and Iran have cooperated in supplying Armenia with weaponry in the midst of the fighting should also give western leaders pause about the structure of power relationships in the region, and the interest of those powers in destabilizing the east-west corridor connecting Europe with Central Asia.

By contrast, getting involved in the South Caucasus will imply the difficult task of managing recalcitrant partners like Turkey. While Turkey has turned increasingly anti-Western in recent years, the crises in Libya and in the Caucasus have clearly shown that more often than not, Turkish interests align with the West and not with Russia. Turkish leaders may not yet fully realize this, upset as they are over Western support for Kurdish groups in Syria aligned with the anti-Turkish PKK terrorist organization. Still, the recent flareup provides an opportunity to work to restore cooperation with Ankara to safeguard the common interest in the security of the South Caucasus as a transit corridor.

The ongoing fighting is a reminder to America and Europe that they ignore security in the South Caucasus at their own peril. Much is at stake, and the conflict’s path of escalation can only be reversed by rebuilding a credible international mediation effort that aspires not only to maintain the status quo but to actually resolve this conflict once and for all. That can only be done by the Western powers and will require a broader re-engagement of the South Caucasus. If that does not happen, then the current flareup risks being only a precursor to much larger wars.

Svante E. Cornell is the director of the American Foreign Policy Council’s Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, co-founder of the Institute for Security and Development Policy and a Policy Advisor to JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Strategy.

Originally published in The National Interest

This op-ed was made possible by the generous support of the Gettler Family Foundation and a portion of the research was conducted on the Benjamin Gettler International Policy Trip.

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Last week the United States restored the $195 million in military aid that it had withheld from Egypt because of the country’s human rights record and its ties to North Korea. This was the right move.

Egypt has long been one of the world’s largest recipients of U.S. aid, accepting $71.6 billion in bilateral military and economic aid between 1948 and 2011 – the largest amount of any country in that time period, other than Israel. The United States has given Egypt about $1.3 billion per year in military aid since 1987. Last August, the United States decided to deny Egypt $95.7 million in aid and to delay an additional $195 million because of concerns about human rights under Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Sisi was elected president after he led the army in ousting Mohammad Mursi. His government then enacted a law restricting the activities of nongovernmental organizations – part of a wider crackdown on dissent. Under Sisi scores of websites have been taken down and journalists and opponents have been arrested. In a 2017 State Department memo to Congress, U.S. officials wrote that the “overall human rights climate in Egypt continues to deteriorate, with the government enacting legislation that conflicts with its human rights obligations, including the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and due process guarantees.” In March voters elected Sisi to a second term, in an election that saw all major opposition candidates cut short their campaigns, citing intimidation.

Yet despite Sisi’s record on human rights, it is still in the United States’ interests to support Egypt. Doing so will help hold the line against IS and prevent Egypt from turning to a country like Russia for security and economic cooperation. Washington should adopt a two-track approach with Egypt, as it has historically done with Turkey, advancing security issues at the same time it pushes for improvements in human rights and democracy.

Egypt has long been a critical U.S. security partner because of its control of the Suez Canal and its border with Israel. When U.S. forces are engaged in the region, Egypt provides expedited access for U.S. naval vessels transiting the Suez Canal and overflight rights for U.S. military aircraft, both of which are crucial for the United States’ ability to project power across the Middle East. Its role as a linchpin of regional stability has grown with multiple forces roiling the Middle East in recent years. Amid Iranian and Russian entrenchment in the Levant, and the recent rise in IS and Hamas operations, Egypt has remained squarely in the camp of secular and reformist Middle Eastern countries trying to stop the spread of Islamist extremism.

Cairo is working with Israel to contain IS in the Sinai and Hamas in Gaza, and the countries’ navies coordinate regularly on Mediterranean security issues. I met with Sisi in May, when I visited Egypt as part of a delegation sponsored by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and he was keen to emphasize the common security interests Cairo shares with Washington and Jerusalem, and his desire to advance both partnerships.

Egypt’s internal security is threatened by a relentless IS-affiliated insurgency in Sinai. In November the group attacked a Sinai mosque, killing more than 300 people. Egypt also faces the ever-present challenge of preventing the conflict in Libya from spilling over its western border. (While Cairo and Washington both want a stable Libya, the Sisi government is backing Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman who was once a CIA asset; the United States is supporting his rival and UN-backed Libyan government.)

Further instability in Egypt would be disastrous for its nearly 100 million citizens, the region and the United States. Regardless of which might come first – the collapse of Egypt’s economy or the spread of Islamist insurgency – the other would surely follow.

The result would be new extremist safe havens, millions of desperate Egyptians seeking to flee to Europe, an existential threat to Israel, the disruption of the Suez Canal upon which global economic stability depends and the potential for the United States to get involved in yet another Middle East quagmire.

Recent American support for Egypt’s counterterrorism efforts in Sinai and the resumption of Bright Star joint military exercises are both steps in the right direction. So is the United States’ recent decision to provide Egypt with its fully-authorized $1.3 billion in foreign military financing.

Egypt needs this assistance to replenish military capabilities expended combatting IS in Sinai, and to respond effectively to any IS resurgence. It will also help improve bilateral military interoperability and promote Egypt’s continued phaseout of Soviet-era weaponry.

U.S. assistance should also include greater technical support for U.S. equipment that Egypt uses in the Sinai and more bilateral military exchanges, including sharing U.S. lessons-learned from counterterrorism operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

These policy changes can bolster Washington’s influence in Cairo, helping to disrupt Russia’s shaping of a Middle East security environment reminiscent of the Cold War. They can also capitalize on a fleeting opportunity to defeat the scourge of IS by advancing an important relationship and promoting economic development and democracy in a vital Middle East partner.

Originally appeared in Reuters on July 30, 2018.

This op-ed was made possible by the generous support of the Gettler Family Foundation and a portion of the research was conducted on the Benjamin Gettler International Policy Trip.

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