Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomed the so-called peace efforts in the South Caucasus and called on the international community to consider these processes as an exemplary model. The President of Turkey announced this in his speech before the participants of the 152nd Assembly of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Istanbul’s Dolmabahçe Palace.

Referring to the developments taking place in the South Caucasus, the head of Turkey said: “We welcome the steps towards building a peaceful future, establishing stability and prosperity in the South Caucasus and we hope that this process will be an example for the whole world.” Erdogan thanked the representatives of about 155 countries gathered in Istanbul. According to him, the Inter-Parliamentary Union has been playing a key role for 137 years and is making a significant contribution to the development of parliamentary democracy, guided by the slogan “Democracy for all”.

“I highly appreciate the mission of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which is aimed at expanding opportunities for dialogue and cooperation, as well as promoting initiatives aimed at establishing peace and justice,” Erdogan emphasized. At the same time, he emphasized the crisis in the current system of international relations. “The international system, which was formed 80 years ago by the victorious states of the Second World War, today faces a serious problem of legitimacy. The values ​​and principles underlying this system are gradually losing their meaning and power.”

The President of Turkey expressed regret that the mandatory norms of international law are becoming ineffective, and new war crimes and crimes against humanity are increasing day by day in the world. “Where there is no common sense, dialogue mechanisms are paralyzed, and diplomacy and negotiations are replaced by weapons, no one can feel safe,” he added. The Turkish president noted that the main priority of Ankara’s foreign policy is the peaceful settlement of conflicts, regardless of their geography. “It is clear that no model of establishing peace and security can to be effective if the countries of the region do not act as the main actors in it,” Erdogan concluded.

His statements can be qualified as an open declaration of regional “ownership”. Welcoming the so-called stabilization processes in the South Caucasus, the Turkish president is trying to legitimize Ankara’s military role in the new regional security architecture. In essence, this is a declaration of regional hegemony, where Turkey assumes the monopoly of dictating the terms of peace and overseeing their implementation, while justifying Turkey’s military-political involvement and support for Azerbaijan during the 44-day war.

The key political thesis of this speech is the exclusion of extra-regional actors, with remarkable nuances. Asserting that any model cannot be viable without the main role of regional countries, Erdogan makes it clear that the future of the Caucasus must be built exclusively “locally”, with the consensus of the Turkey-Iran-Russia power triangle and local actors. This is a direct challenge to the European and international institutional formats, which Ankara is trying to push out of the regional agenda.

However, in this context, the role of the USA deserves special attention. Washington’s active mediation in the Armenia-Azerbaijan negotiations is not a problem for Turkey, because the American agenda in the South Caucasus often coincides with Turkish geopolitical interests.

Ankara’s confidence stems from the fact that American mediation, aimed at weakening Russian and Iranian influence and unblocking communication channels, creates favorable conditions for Turkish expansion. And it turns out a situation where the foreign mediator actually serves the strengthening of the Turkish geopolitical axis, which causes a serious contradiction between Erdogan’s official rhetoric and real policy.

Erdogan’s claim about the “legitimacy crisis” of the international relations system serves as a justification for power politics. Declaring that the old world order formed after the Second World War has lost its validity, Erdogan is trying to legitimize the new status quo formed by the use of force. Presenting the Caucasian processes as a “world example”, he records the Turkish dominance as an established fact, presenting Ankara as the only alternative guarantor of security, against the “paralyzed” global mechanisms.

Thus, Erdogan’s rhetoric reaffirms the reality that the era of “total pragmatism” has come to replace the regulated era of international law in modern geopolitics. In the absence of clear and universal rules of the game, the states are guided exclusively by the maximum promotion of their own interests, using diplomatic statements as a veil to hide power realignments. In the end, the calls of the President of Turkey should be understood not as an invitation to cooperation, but as a record of the new geopolitical status-quo. The “peace model” of the South Caucasus, which Ankara so diligently promotes, actually reflects the essence of the modern world order, where peace is not the result of law, but the result of the use of force and the rigid calculation of interests.

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