A few weeks ago, on September 27th, Azerbaijan launched a series of attacks on the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, located in the southern Caucasus Mountains. The region has a population of roughly 150,000, primarily ethnic Armenians. In response, the Armenians allegedly destroyed a couple of Azeri helicopters and tanks. At first glance, this probably doesn’t look like a terribly unusual incident. That region has been a disputed territory for a very long time, claimed by both Azerbaijan and the Armenians. But this time there’s something different about it. Not only do the Azeri forces outnumber the native Armenians by roughly three-to-one, but they are now sporting some significantly improved military hardware and weaponry. And it’s being supplied to them by Turkey, in what appears to be a sort of proxy war being waged by the Turkish tyrant Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As the NY Post pointed out this week, this is all too reminiscent of the Armenian genocide inflicted by Turkey roughly a century ago.
Fostering a proxy war in Armenia may serve Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s needs, but it’s an appalling echo of the genocide Turkey committed against Armenians a century ago…
Erdogan’s backing of Azerbaijan is a useful distraction from his sagging domestic economy, but it turns a long-standing local conflict into a bigger geopolitical competition. Armenia can resist only with the backing of Russia, which has been fueling that side of the arms race — which means it’s just a step or two to direct conflict between Moscow and Ankara.
“We are a step away from a large-scale war,” says Olesya Vartanyan of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing deadly conflicts.
This is a messy, complicated situation. Azerbaijan has long claimed ownership of this region, one of the last real strongholds of Armenians in the area. But the Armenians are equally adamant about it being their territory. On their own, the Azeri shouldn’t be capable of fully prosecuting this sort of war. But with Turkey’s financial and military backing they are clearly able to turn up the heat significantly.
Making matters worse is the standing relationship that the Armenians have with Russia. They’ve long supplied arms to the Armenians and maintained favorable trade deals with them. But all of this is happening at the same time that Vladimir Putin has been reaching out to Erdogan, supplying him with military hardware, missile systems, and in the near future, fighter jets. So a proxy war between Turkey and Russia at this juncture would be awkward, to say the least.
Erdogan has long since proven that he’s no longer a true ally of the west and he does not intend to support his supposed allies in NATO. He’s been cozying up to the Russians, the Chinese and Iran for several years now. Perhaps those relationships have given him the confidence to act out in this fashion. But given Moscow’s historic ties to the Armenians, he may be overplaying his hand. Turkey may be burning all of its bridges and their list of friends is growing thin.
Turkey wiped out more than 1.5 million Armenians in the period following the first world war. Their entire people were nearly wiped off the face of the Earth. Erdogan may not want to risk dirtying his hands even further by attacking directly, but his use of Azerbaijan as a proxy certainly makes it look like he’s interested in finishing the job. Is this a situation that the United States and our allies should be intervening in directly using our own military power? Probably not. But we’ll want to keep an eye on this corner of the world in the months to come. A very old and cold war may be warming up again.
