news.az, Azerbaijan
July 16 2010
Karabakh to be low on international community’s priority list unless war breaks
Fri 16 July 2010 | 10:28 GMT Text size:
Thomas Ambrosio News.Az interviews Thomas Ambrosio, an associate
professor of political science at North Dakota State University.
Baku says that fatal incident that took place during the night of 18
to 19 June at the Line of Contact in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
zone shows that the conflict is not frozen. Do you expect a new war in
the region?
No, I do not. While it could be argued that the parties to the
conflict have fundamentally (and, in my opinion, irreconcilable)
differences over the causes of the conflict, the legitimacy of the
current situation, and visions for the future, they do not appear to
have an interest in a renewed conflict. Armenia already has what it
wants with a de facto Greater Armenia — it therefore has no reason to
ignite an open conflict which could negatively affect the status quo.
For its part, initiating a conflict with Armenia would likely provoke
American condemnation, leaving Baku isolated, and, quite possibly,
Russian intervention given that Moscow is allied with Armenia and has
made it rather clear that it does not wish to see the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict resolved through force. Granted, Russia’s role in
Nagorno-Karabakh is far less than in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (the
latter two have Moscow directly inserted into the secessionist
movements), but the lessons of the 2008 Russia-Georgia War should not
be lost on Baku.
International community still doesn’t pay much attention to the
Karabakh conflict. What else should happen to make the world be more
interested in stability in our region?
Quite frankly, unless open war breaks out between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh will continue to be low on the
international community’s priority list. There are other actual or
potential conflicts in close proximity (e.g., nation-building in Iraq
and Afghanistan and the nuclear dispute with Iran) that have a much
higher priority since they involve critical decisions that need to be
made in the near-to-medium term. While the June flare-up brought some
attention, the conflict remains largely frozen, which a relatively
stable (if sometimes rough) status quo established and holding from
the mid-1990s. No real decisions need to be made regarding
Nagorno-Karabakh – things can remain ‘as is’ as far as many
international observers are concerned.
An American intelligence officer said in his recent interview in
Foreign Policy magazine that `We frankly don’t care about human rights
or democracy-building, or Israel and Turkey, or peace in Karabakh or
Georgia, or even Azerbaijani energy”. Do you think that this position
really reflects American policy in our region?
The statement you quote is too harsh and greatly exaggerated, but
there is a kernel of truth to it. They would never say anything
remotely like this publicly; instead, they would list this same
series of issues and countries and proclaim that they are all
‘priorities’. But, as we know, if everything is a priority, the word
loses its meaning. There are priorities with a lower-case ‘p’ and
those with an upper-case ‘P’ — every administration, every country,
and every observer will have a different ranking. Sometimes,
realities on the ground or the events of the moment determine which
priorities are more significant.
This statement which you quote goes on to imply that Afghanistan is
the all-encompassing priority for America. This is not entirely true
either, but, again, there is a kernel of truth to it. The reality is
that the conflict in Afghanistan is becoming a sink-hole for the Obama
administration which, in my opinion, was never all that interested in
the conflict to begin with. They used it cynically during the 2008
presidential campaign to somehow draw a distinction between a ‘good
war’ (Afghanistan) and a ‘bad war’ (Iraq) in order to show that Obama
was tough on terror and to criticize President Bush. However, after
becoming president, Obama has found himself boxed in by his own
rhetoric and has been increasingly drawn into what many are calling an
unwinnable conflict. While people said that about Iraq (and that was
turned around), there are important and critical differences between
the two conflicts, the most important of which is the role of Pakistan
as an incubator and safe-haven for the Taliban, which makes the
situation far more complex and difficult to resolve.
As a result, the conflict in Afghanistan is beginning to overwhelm
other foreign policy issues. This is for two reasons. First, it is
an open conflict in which life-and-death decisions need to be made on
a daily basis which affect the long-term interests of the United
States. It should therefore not be surprising that other issues
decline to secondary or tertiary importance. Second, and possibly
more importantly, the members of the administration are only human.
Even if they would like to deal with all of these issues, they simply
can not. There is not enough time, energy, and diplomatic capital to
go around. Therefore, an increasingly myopic focus on one issue to
the detriment of others is not surprising.
Head of Pentagon Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Ms. Clinton have
recently paid visits to Baku. Is it a message of increasing US
interest to Azerbaijan and the region?
This appears to be more of a correction for the downgrading of Obama’s
foreign policy toward Azerbaijan in the first year or so after taking
office, rather than a sign of a true increase in Azerbaijan’s
importance to the U.S. American support for Azerbaijan was seen by
key people in the Obama White House as being tied to and a legacy of
the Bush administration. In the first part of his presidency, Obama
wanted to be seen as the un-Bush – almost blindly reversing Bush-era
policies in order to show how different he was from this predecessor.
However, they are now realizing that such a policy is
counterproductive and that some Bush-era policies reflected actual US
interests, not just the idiosyncrasies of the prior administration.
Might the US try to help reach some progress in the Karabakh
settlement to assure Baku that Azerbaijani-American relations are
good?
I do not see this as a real possibility. The differences between the
two sides are too great and based upon diametrically opposed positions
to see any real, substantive, long-term progress. One needs only to
look at the failure of the Turkey-Armenia agreement to see this.
Although it was one of the tauted ‘successes’ of the Obama
administration’s foreign policy, they misjudged the willingness of
Ankara to normalize relations with Yerevan absent progress on the
Yerevan-Baku front. They believed that the agreement would help
produce a settlement on Nagorno-Karabakh. However, top Turkish
officials said repeatedly, in no uncertain terms, that normalization
was dependent on Yerevan making concessions to Baku. As we have seen,
they were not bluffing and ratification of the agreement is now off
the table — all we have are two signatures on a piece of paper. The
U.S. administration got the causal order wrong. Coming back to
Nagorno-Karabakh, the causation may be wrong as well: U.S. relations
with Azerbaijan need to be good first in order to be seen as an honest
broker in order to achieve progress on Karabakh, not the other way
around.
Leyla Tagiyeva
News.Az
From: A. Papazian