The National Interest
By Michael Rubin
Dec. 15, 2020
[The United States essentially forfeited its influence over the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and allowed Russia’s Vladimir Putin to wield
power in the region.]
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan joined his Azerbaijani
counterpart Ilham Aliyev on a podium in Baku on Dec. 10 to watch a
parade celebrating “Victory in the Patriotic War.” The procession
marked Aliyev’s latest celebration as he cements his legacy as the man
who returned territories Azerbaijan lost to Armenia in the 1988–1994
Nagorno-Karabakh War.
Aliyev is a short-term thinker. He does not yet understand the
tremendous price of his victory: Azerbaijan’s sovereignty. Russia and
Turkey have stationed forces inside Azerbaijani territory. Turkey also
reportedly controls several thousand mercenaries transported into
Azerbaijan from Syria, Libya, and other Arab countries. None of these
forces are under Aliyev’s control and both Moscow and Ankara can
easily leverage them against Aliyev and his family should he stray too
far from Erdoğan or Russian president Vladimir Putin’s dictates.
Aliyev may focus on Nagorno-Karabakh but for Putin, the game is much
bigger and extends across the Caucasus, if not beyond. It involves not
territory, but rather than nature of government. Alas, in the latest
Caucasus war, Putin won again as he signals to the region that Russian
authoritarianism offers security while liberal democracy brings only
chaos and territorial loss.
Neither the Trump administration nor the Obama administration before
it particularly cared about the Caucasus. Their strategic neglect was
unfortunate, not only because of the region’s strategic value but also
because of its cultural weight. In 301 AD, the Kingdom of Armenia
declared Christianity to be its official religion and so became the
oldest Christian country on earth. More importantly, the peoples of
the South Caucasus have both early and repeatedly embraced democracy,
a cultural attitude that Putin resents. Iranian democrats operating
largely from Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, modeled their
1905 Constitutional Revolution after the successful Russian effort to
subordinate the Tsar to a legislative body earlier that year. In
subsequent years, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia each achieved
independence against the backdrop of the Russian Empire’s dissolution,
before subsequently losing it to Soviet aggression.
Each of the three independent countries in the Caucasus have now had
experiences with popular revolution and democracy. When Azerbaijan
seceded from the Soviet Union, Ayaz Mutallibov, the first secretary of
the regional communist party, simply took over as president but he was
ousted following a series of disastrous military and economic events.
On June 7, 1992, Azeris went to the polls in their first democratic
election. Abulfaz Elchibey won 60 percent of the vote in a field of
five, and formerly assumed power nine days later as Azerbaijan’s first
non-communist leader. Elchibey sought to pivot Azerbaijan’s foreign
policy away from Russia, but his efforts at setting Azerbaijan down a
democratic path floundered in the face of both Russian opposition and
a disastrous military campaign in Nagorno-Karabakh. Elchibey fell
within a year, fleeing into exile as former KGB operative and
communist functionary Heydar Aliyev assumed power, consolidating a
dictatorship and eventually handing power over to his son and current
leader.
Georgia, too, followed a similar path. Former dissident Zviad
Gamsakhurdia led protests and demonstrations which, against the
backdrop of the Soviet Union’s collapse, culminated in the restoration
of Georgian independence. Gamsakhurdia did not last long, however.
Opposition grew to his dictatorial tendencies. He sought to repress
South Ossetian nationalism which he accused the Kremlin of
encouraging. Ultimately, a Russian-backed coup unseated Gamsakhurdia
after less than a year in office, and he died under mysterious
circumstances in exile less than two years later. Former Soviet
foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze became president. He understood
the need to balance relations between Russia and the United States,
although he encouraged NATO’s eastward expansion and sought to orient
Georgia more in the Western camp. Ultimately, in 2003, after
parliamentary elections which international observers deemed
fraudulent, protestors in the so-called “Rose Revolution” forced
Shevardnadze’s resignation. Mikheil Saakashvili, a leader of the
revolution, dominated subsequent polls winning 96 percent in an
election with more than 82 percent turnout. Saakashvili interpreted
his landslide as a mandate to more firmly tie Georgia to the West.
Putin despised Saakashvili and, in 2008, intervened directly in
support of both Abkazian and South Ossetian secession efforts. The
Russian occupation kneecapped Saakashvili’s ambitions and his
popularity plummeted. In 2013, after losing a parliamentary election,
Saakashvili fled Georgia and subsequently moved to Ukraine where he
renounced his Georgian citizenship in order to avoid extradition on
corruption and abuse-of-power charges. In the post-Saakashvili-era,
Georgia returned to a more balanced foreign policy deferential to
Kremlin sensitivities and red lines.
Armenia, perhaps culturally the closest country in the Caucasus to
Russia, has followed the same pattern. Former journalist turned
politician Nikol Pashinyan shot to power against the backdrop in 2018
of mass protests against attempts by Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia’s
long-time prime minister, to extend his term. Pashinyan sought greater
foreign policy neutrality. While he did nothing either to challenge
Russia’s influence in Armenia or the presence of the Russian base in
Gyumri, both his willingness to cultivate the West and his rise in a
people power revolution were deeply offensive to Putin for whom such
uprisings are a nightmare scenario.
Armenians may be disappointed that Russia did little to protect them
against the Azerbaijani and Turkish onslaught in the most recent
Nagorno-Karabakh War but, in hindsight, protecting Armenia—and
especially the self-declared Artsakh Republic in Nagorno-Karabakh—was
secondary to reinforcing a lesson the Kremlin had previously applied
to Azerbaijan and Georgia: Democratic revolutions may bring short-term
political freedom, but they also lead to territorial loss and an
erosion of sovereignty.
In contrast, Putin has shown that dictatorships and
counter-revolutionary regimes succeed where their democratic
predecessors fail. Elchibey in Azerbaijan, Saakashvili in Georgia, and
now Pashinyan in Armenia all assumed office amidst popular acclaim.
All presided over significant territorial loss—Elchibey to Armenia,
Saakashvili to Russian-backed forced, and Pashinyan to Azerbaijan.
Both Elchibey and Saakashvili ended their political careers in exile
and disgrace and, if opposition parties in Armenia have their way,
Pashinyan may not be far behind.
Such Russian success need not have been foreordained. The United
States essentially forfeited its influence long before the first shots
were fired in the most recent conflict, and neither the White House
nor the State Department has done anything to regain leverage. Too
often it seems that U.S. officials fail to see the forest through the
trees and recognize the long game that Putin is playing.
*
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and a frequent author for the National Interest.