The European Commission president will visit Baku and Yerevan to build on the EU’s strategic engagement with the South Caucasus and to strengthen energy cooperation, trade and regional connectivity for the EU economies.

By Charlie Breitrose

Watertown High School students, alumni, and parents of students who took part in the Armenian language program urged School officials to bolster the program for fear of losing the classes that are more than just about learning a language.

At Monday’s School Committee meeting, several people spoke about the Armenian classes, which are part of the World Language offerings at the High School. During the meeting, the School Committee also heard a report about the district’s World Language Program, a survey of what languages students and parents are interested in, and the progress of students who have been in the elementary school Spanish immersion program.

The speaker noted that the Armenian teacher recently resigned, and said that having students with four levels of proficiency in the same class is not something that other languages or subjects would have to do.

Some pointed to the Armenian classes as an important cultural asset, keeping the culture and language alive that has been threatened in years past during the Armenian Genocide and during Soviet rule of Armenia, as well as today when parts of Armenia have been under military attack.

The parents asked for at least a 0.6 FTE (full time equivalent) teaching position for the Armenian program to teach three periods, instead of the 0.4 in the budget, because it will be hard to find a person who can teach Armenian part time.

World Language Coordinator Adam Silverberg said that a candidate for the Armenian language teaching position has been interviewed and the school is in the process of hiring someone.

WHS Principal Joel Giacobozzi said he understands where the people who spoke are coming from. His grandfather came to the United States fleeing genocide in Armenia.

“So I completely and wholeheartedly agree with not only the comments about the history that involves the Genocide, but also the current atrocities that are happening in that country. We can’t forget that, and we won’t forget that,” Giacobozzi said. “With that said, we have infinite need and finite resources.”

He and Silverberg set up a meeting with representatives from the group that spoke, he said.

“We’re really discussing, listening deeply to the suggestions from the public,” Giacobozzi said. “We’re very proud of what we’re offering, and we can always do better, and we will continue to look at how we can do better in the immediate and in the future.”

World Languages Program

A survey about interest in World Language was sent out to students in grades 6-12 and parents of students in grades K-12. Currently, WHS offers Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Armenian. The survey also asked about interest in French, Portuguese, Mandarin, Latin, and American Sign Language (ASL).

Silverberg said there was significant interest in adding French. The school previously offered that language.

“French was eliminated in my first year here as Arabic transitioned into the program, so we thought it was time to see if there were other needs or wants from the community,” Silverberg said.

Spanish is the most popular language, and Silverberg added that the Italian classes at the middle school are full, and there are six classes. The Arabic classes have dropped a bit to between 12 and 17 students per class.

The survey did not lead to any immediate changes to the World Languages program.

“We’re not necessarily recommending adding or subtracting the language,” Silverberg said. “We believe we have a solid core programming for the number of students and number of staff in our district, and I think it could be something that we look into in the future if we wanted to reintroduce French.”

With the strong interest in French, School Committee member Rachel Kay asked why the district is not starting to phase in the language. Silverberg said he could discuss that with the district, high school and middle school administration.

“I think we have robust offerings right now, and my fear would be if we were to add a language, would it hurt the other languages?” Silverberg said. “It’s by all means worth looking into, and seeing if there would be a desire.”

School Committee Chair Kendra Foley said she would not want the school to jump into a decision because it could have other impacts.

“This is one good data point. Certainly, I don’t want to make decisions based on one good data point. And we’re a small school, and sometimes we have to decide, make trade-offs, and so it’s already hard,” Foley said. “I know scheduling is very hard when you have small groups, and so if we were going to take a look at different options, there may be a need to phase things out if you add new things in.”

Silverberg also discussed the progress of students in the Spanish immersion program, which begins in kindergarten in the Watertown Public Schools. The first set of students reached the ninth grade, and tested at an intermediate range of proficiency in Spanish. Those scores were higher than ninth-graders in the Italian and Arabic classes.

Watertown High School students can earn a Seal of Biliteracy, and an average of 20% of students receive that honor each year, Silverberg said. In 2026, 37 students, which was 20% of the seniors, earned the Seal of Biliteracy.

See the slides from the World Languages update by clicking here.

Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar plans to propose on Sunday a cabinet resolution to officially recognize the genocide against the Armenian people during the final years of the Ottoman Empire, his office says, in a move that will no doubt provoke diplomatic rival Turkey.

Armenians have long sought international recognition of the killings in the early 20th century, which reportedly left some 1.5 million of their people dead, as a genocide. Turkey — the Ottoman Empire’s successor state — strongly rejects the allegation that the massacres, imprisonment and forced deportation of Armenians amounted to genocide.

Israel long avoided recognizing the killings as genocide due to the diplomatic sensitivity of the matter, but the sharp deterioration of relations with Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has repeatedly accused Israel of genocide in Gaza, has led it to take certain steps toward recognition in recent years. Last August, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said for the first time that he recognized the genocide.

“Despite extensive and unequivocal historical documentation, the Armenian Genocide remains the subject of an organized campaign of denial and minimization, including the manipulative rewriting of history books, primarily by Turkey,” the explanatory text for the proposal says.

“In light of this moral and historical obligation, it is proposed that the Government of Israel recognize the genocide committed against the Armenian people during the final years of the Ottoman Empire. In addition, given ongoing attempts to blur, minimize, or deny the atrocities of the Armenian Genocide, the proposal calls for condemning all efforts to distort the historical truth of these events.”

Conventional wisdom holds that a country guards its independence by holding its ground, and that to surrender a claim to a part of its imagined territory, even one outside its control, is to surrender a part of its sovereignty. This attitude helps to explain the dozens of ongoing territorial disputes across the world—Venezuela’s desire for the Essequibo region of Guyana, dueling Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir, and the controversy around China’s “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, among others—and why they are so intractable.

Armenia is no stranger to this view. For decades, it vigorously defended its claim to the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally-recognized territory of Azerbaijan. Even after the enclave, known as the Republic of Artsakh, fell to an Azerbaijani offensive in 2023, Armenian politicians railed against Azerbaijan and vowed to liberate the territory from Baku’s control in a future conflict.

But this attitude has its limits. After Armenia lost the war, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recognized that for Armenia—a small state wedged between far larger powers—an unwinnable claim could also become the mechanism by which his nation’s sovereignty was lost, and sought to win long-term peace in the south Caucasus by giving up Armenia’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh. The deeper meaning of Pashinyan’s reelection on June 7 is a vote of confidence from the Armenian people in this approach—and a reward for Pashinyan’s remarkable personal courage in pursuing it.

How Irredentism Traps Nations

Sovereignty is rarely lost when a small nation reaches for a larger foreign patron. More often, the process plays out in reverse: the patron detects a useful grievance held by a smaller power and approaches it, playing on its hatreds and promising it the arms, money, and protection that make an unwinnable fight feel winnable.The sponsor’s interest, however, is in the conflict itself, not its resolution. A frozen grievance is a dependable instrument of control. The client soon can no longer make peace without the patron’s permission; it cannot run an independent foreign policy; it cannot even picture a future not organized around the lost land. To further a claim it will never make good on, it must accept a dependency it cannot break.

Armenia was trapped inside such a claim for a generation. Its war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh began in the late 1980s, during the final days of the Soviet Union, and killed tens of thousands of Armenians and Azerbaijanis before its final resolution. To hold the territory against a larger, wealthier, and militarily stronger neighbor, Yerevan mortgaged itself to Moscow, which was only too happy to keep both Armenia and Azerbaijan tethered to Russian goodwill by keeping their quarrel alive. As a result, Armenia spent decades as a poor, corrupt, and strategically captive Russian client state. The very thing it was fighting to prove—that it was a sovereign nation—became a casualty of the fight.

For Armenians, this is an old pattern. Long before Moscow weaponized Karabakh, the Russian Empire and France each cultivated Armenian national aspirations as a lever against the Ottoman Empire—Russia casting itself as protector of Christianity in the Near East, France arming and encouraging the Armenians of Cilicia during and after World War I. In each case, the great power nurtured the hopes and aspirations of a stateless people, so long as those hopes served its own interests—then walked away when they did not, leaving the Armenians to face the terrible consequences alone.

How Nikol Pashinyan Changed Armenia’s Path

Pashinyan did not start out as a skeptic of Armenia’s relationship with Russia. When the 2018 Velvet Revolution carried him to power, he defended the claim to Karabakh as ardently as the men he replaced. What ultimately broke the spell was the 2020 war, which stripped away three-quarters of the Armenian-held territory in six weeks—and laid bare how little Russian patronage was worth when it counted.

In the years that followed, Pashinyan came to believe that the pursuit of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, not Armenia’s defeat, was the problem. As long as Yerevan defined itself by land it could not keep, it would remain the ward of whatever great power would help it pretend otherwise. Letting the claim go was not surrendering its sovereignty, but the first step toward its recovery. 

Pashinyan took that step at a staggering personal cost. He signed away the occupied districts, formally recognized Azerbaijani sovereignty over the region, and absorbed the rage that followed when Baku retook the enclave in 2023 and its Armenian residents fled. He was branded a traitor; the Russia-linked Apostolic Church and a Moscow-funded opposition mobilized to bring him down. Yet Armenians returned him to office anyway on June 7—not because the loss had stopped hurting, but because a majority had reached the conclusion that the alternative to peace was a future mortgaged permanently to another nation’s interests. 

Armenia Is Doing What Palestine Won’t

The Palestinian movement sits in the identical trap and keeps making the identical wrong choice. Its claim to all of historic Palestine is no more feasible than Armenia’s claim to Karabakh, and clinging to it has carried the same price: a people kept perpetually mobilized, perpetually dependent, and perpetually useful to sponsors, Iran foremost among them. Tehran professes to care for the suffering of the Palestinian people, yet it has done virtually nothing to alleviate that suffering; it has not helped to build a viable Palestinian state, improved the capacity of the Palestinian Authority to govern, or invested in development efforts in the West Bank and Gaza. Its strategic interest lies in the continuation of the struggle, rather than in any Palestinian state being built. Palestinian grievance is the asset, and Iran can be counted on to oppose any resolution of the grievance, even one that would benefit the Palestinian people.

The cost of that approach is on display right now. The American-brokered agreement that paused the Gaza war in late 2025 has stalled—not over borders or aid, but over Hamas’ refusal to disarm and give up on its farcical desire to wipe Israel off the map. A temporary ceasefire can be signed, but a true peace cannot be reached while one party’s identity still rests on the other’s destruction.

Armenia is doing the unglamorous and unpopular work that actually ends conflicts. Its constitution still reaches, through a preamble that invokes a 1989 act calling for the “reunification” of Armenia with Karabakh, toward a claim on territory the world recognizes as Azerbaijani, and Baku has made clear there can be no settled peace while a neighbor’s founding charter lays claim to its land.

Pashinyan is moving to remove that language. Armenia’s constitutional court has ruled that this cannot be accomplished by simple amendment, but only by adopting an entirely new constitution, approved in a national referendum. This is a politically perilous undertaking, and the vote, expected around 2027, is no sure thing. But it is the institutional form of the choice he made after 2020—the act that turns one leader’s decision into a country’s commitment, so the peace rests on the Armenian state rather than on a single exposed prime minister. The Palestinian leadership has spent thirty years dodging the equivalent step, and that dodge is why the conflict outlives every truce. 

None of this requires pretending that Armenia’s defeat is painless, or that it is fair. It is neither. What Armenia is demonstrating is narrower and far harder won: that for a small nation, sovereignty is not measured by the claims it refuses to abandon, but by its freedom to choose its own future. This freedom begins the moment it stops letting a lost cause be owned by someone else. Pashinyan understood that the only way to peace and sovereignty was to set down the one thing he had always been told he must never release. Swallowing defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh will be bitter for the Armenians. But Armenia will survive it, and it will emerge a better, stronger, and freer nation on the other end.

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in various outlets such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

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