Armenia – Azerbaijan War: Turkey and Iran at Risk

After Azerbaijan’s lightning assault on Nagorno-Karabakh caused ethnic Armenians to flee the region, there’s potential that Azerbaijan will continue to invade Armenia proper.

The motivation for this second phase of the invasion would be to control a land corridor connecting different parts of Azerbaijan. Thanks to Stalin’s chaotic cartography, this region’s power dynamics are just a tad messy. Now mix in some complex geography and bippity-boppity-boo; welcome to the Caucasus.

There is a more significant issue playing out behind the scenes, though. If Azerbaijan is successful in this second invasion, it would place Turkish and Iranian powers within spitting distance of one another. And I can assure you that no one wants to see how that plays out.

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Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from an exciting hotel room. The news I wanted to talk today is about something that has to do with caucuses again. For those of you who remember a few weeks ago, the Azerbaijanis launched a fair bit of a lightning assault on a place called Nagorno-Karabakh, which is an area that was populated with ethnic Armenians.

And the war was over in less than three days. And pretty much all of the Armenians who were living there have since absconded and left for Armenia proper, where there’s now going to be, it looks like a second phase of that conflict where the Azerbaijanis are likely to invade Armenia proper. What’s going on here is that the Azerbaijanis are looking for a land corridor to connect to parts of the country in order to explain the significance of that and have to do a little bit of screen sharing here to Google Zoom, which was Earth, which is one of my favorite programs ever.

Anyway, here we are looking at where the former Soviet space in the north meets with the Middle East in the South and the Caucasus is this mountainous land bridge in between. And let’s just go through a little bit more, okay. So the northern caucuses or the greater caucuses is this line here very rugged, very steep, home to a lot of ethnic minorities like you would expect in any number of mountainous zone.

This is an area where the Russians have always had a problem. The Chechens, if you remember them, live right here. And then you’ve got these two little enclaves in the north, Abkhazia here in South Ossetia here, where the Russians have sent in troops and basically occupy them and make them de facto Russian territory. And some people would say that the Russians are basically trying to do this in Ukraine as well.

But it’s I think it’s important to understand that for the Russians, it’s all about controlling the access point. So that’s Ukraine, where that’s the worst that they’ve watched here in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Russians know that their population is dying out. So they believe that they came forward, positioned troops in the access points that they will have an easier time defending themselves.

So there is a coastal road here in Kasia. There’s a path that links the northeast Russian province, which is part of the Russian Federation with the South Ossetian province, which is part of Georgia. And they’re trying to plug those access points. So you’re going to see a lot of this, whether it’s in Central Asia or the western periphery that is near Europe.

And that actually is kind of relevant to the discussion about what’s going on in this region and where media. Now, here we’ve got the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, the capital here is Baku. It’s got about half the population, the entire place, the former Soviet Republic of Europe, an independent Armenia, is right here. You have the Turks over here and the Iranians to the south know Egypt a little bit more.

And Yerevan, capital of Armenia, Mt. Ararat, is a zone that supposedly Noah’s Ark crashed into as the floods receded. It is the national symbol of Yerevan, of the Armenians, and it is not in their territory, it’s in Turkey, but they can see it. A dominates the skyline from the capital. Nagorno-Karabakh is this mountainous zone over here. This is the area that the Azerbaijanis recently liberated from Armenian control and the caravan, which is right here, is that chunk of Azerbaijani territory that the Azerbaijani would like to physically connect to the country.

And if all of this seems like just cartographic spaghetti, it is. And you can think Joe Stalin for that, because at the time that the Soviet Union was gaining control of this area in the twenties, he went through and modified all the borders to make sure that if any of these areas ever got independence again, that it would immediately be at one another’s throats.

And he wielded his pen with extreme levels of skill so that the people a little bit closer. The dominant issue in this area actually isn’t the Russians. The Russians had a defense agreement with the Armenians until very recently, and I guess technically it’s still in force. But the Russians have moved most of their troops out, moved them to Ukraine because they need every pair of hands and every gun.

And yet and that’s kind of held this area frozen. But once you get into the lesser Caucasus, remember greater Caucasus, which are the North less your Caucasus or this kind of broad zone in the south, the mountains are nearly as onerous. It’s still mountainous, it’s still difficult. But there are a lot more corridors that access this area. And in this zone, it’s traditionally not been the Russians that have been the major power.

It’s been either the Turks or the Iranians. Well, let’s see here on that. The local powers have always had those Turks and Armenians is accessing one another’s land. The Turks and the Iranians have always had a bit of a problem rubbing up against each other. There are a number of mountain passes and access points and corridors that allow access, but they’re all seasonal and limited, with one exception.

And that is this right here. This is the Cross River, and this is the best point of access between Anatolia or Turkey or the Turks in Persia or Iran in the Arabians. The thing is, Stalin, again, it’s split. So in the north, the northeast section of that corridor is controlled by Armenian. It’s home to the Armenian, the capital of Europe in the northwest chunk is controlled by the Turks and is home to Mount Ararat.

The Southeast Choke is Nikitin and it is controlled by the Azerbaijani and in the southwest Choke is Iranian, right here in Iranian Azerbaijan. So goes the thinking. The Iranians are really happy with the current state of affairs because if this corridor is split into four different chunks, then no one can really use it to pour Turkish power down into northern region.

However, what’s going on with the Azerbaijanis is they want a corridor that crosses this zone of southern Armenia and directly links Azerbaijan to Nikitin. And then there’s a road and rail system here that goes into Turkey proper. If that happens and you have Turkish power controlling over half of the corridor and the Turks can directly reinforce Baku by road and by rail.

And from the Iranian point of view, this would be a disaster, a disaster from Armenian point of view as well. Not only would they lose control of some of their southern territories, but then they would be completely locked off and surrounded by Turkish power. And if you’re familiar with your history, the Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks in World War One was pretty brutal.

And so the Armenians are looking for anything, anything to kind of grab on to a degree of independence. They need a security gear, a security guarantor. And if they can’t have the Russians and the Iranians or the all the other player in town in Azerbaijan getting control of southern Armenia would basically end that forever. And then it would just be a matter of time before Armenia itself becomes a state repeating of the Turkish system, rather than the Iranian or the Russian system, something that the Armenians would rather avoid.

But for the Iranians, this is also a national issue, because this corridor, if you continue following the south, eventually reaches the city of Tabriz, which is the capital of the northern region. Excuse me, if Iran and northern Iran is primarily populated by ethnic Azeris who are basically the same ethnic stock as the folks who run as a region.

So they have always been the group in Iran that the Iranians have been most nervous about exercising a degree of independence, that the Turks get de facto control of this area, all of a sudden that is very much in play. So we have a situation here where maybe the Russian are only being stage left because of the situation in Ukraine.

They can only focus on the things that are core to them. And since they control Abkhazia and South Ossetia, they control the access points to the Northern Caucuses, and they’re kind of declaring that good enough. But with the Turks now rising, we’re going to have a second level of contest in this region between the Turks and the Iranians, with the Azerbaijanis being a very, very, very willing ally.

So what we’re going to see over the next several weeks or months, something that the United States is concerned about, is this point becoming in play, because if that becomes in play, then this whole or all of a sudden becomes in play. And we need to start thinking about what it means to have Turkish troops in the cave in hard on another part of the Iranian border.

That’s where it is. Okay. I think that’s everything. You guys take care.

Armenia vs. Azerbaijan: Unpacking the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

Today, we’re looking at some of the recent developments and shifting dynamics in the South Caucasus. The assault on Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh appears to be a tidy victory for Azerbaijan, but there’s more at play here.

As Azerbaijan emerges as a regional power and adds to its economic and strategic advantages, Armenia is quickly realizing that Russia isn’t there to protect them. Armenia is grasping at straws for protection to avoid being entirely land-locked and cut off from the world. Some of Armenia’s adjustments would functionally end the relationship with Russia.

With all the movement in the region, I suspect this won’t be the last time we chat about Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
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Transcript

Hey everybody. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from Colorado. It is the 21st of September. And in the last three days, we’ve seen like 30 years of history in the caucuses fall apart and reform. So a lot to unpack here. First of all, what are the caucuses? They’re a double series of mountain chains that are under the land bridge that connect to the former Soviet space and northern Eurasia to more classic Middle Eastern zone, such as Iran and Turkey and Mesopotamia.

These mountains, for the most part, go east west. They serve as significant blocks to movement in all directions, really. And there’s a number of different climate zones in there. You combine the climate zones with the mountains, you get a lot of minor powers, three of which have consolidated into semi coherent countries Azerbaijan, Armenian, Georgia. And then they’re surrounded by three much larger powers Russia, Iran and Turkey.

And between the very small ethnicities, the larger ones are the three small powers. And then, of course, the three mega powers. This place has always been a mess. It’s a zone that even the Mongols had some problems with. Anyway, geopolitics in this area has kind of been froze in since at least 1992. But arguably going back to the start of the Soviet system at the end of World War One.

But things are finally moving. And the whole point of this series is to give you an idea of what to see and where things are most likely to break, because in the last few days, something has very much, very much broken. What’s gone down is that the Azerbaijanis have launched a military assault on territory controlled by Armenia, territory that the Armenians have controlled since the end of the Soviet period back in the early nineties.

And in essence, the Armenian position has completely collapsed. The Azerbaijani appear to have achieved an unconditional victory. Now I would argue that taking the big picture into account here, an Armenian defeat was always inevitable. Has been for 30 years. Azerbaijan has independence, had three times the population and four times the economy. And that was before the regions became a major energy exporter, with them sending about a million barrels a day of crude in the European direction right now, as the region also has better partners.

It’s got its ethnic kin in places like Turkey. It gets along pretty well with the Europeans because of that energy. It’s seen as a bypass and as an alternative to the Russians who the Europeans now all see as warmongers. So the idea that Azerbaijan would emerge on top here isn’t really a surprise. The issue is that it took so long, and that is because of the Russians.

Russians strategic policy since the end of the Cold War has been about finding groups that it can leverage and turn into satellites and drive as wedges into different parts of communities or turn into roadblocks in the others. In this case, it’s definitely the roadblock argument. The Russians gave a blanket security guarantee to the Armenians in order to cause problems for the Azerbaijanis so that Azerbaijan could not emerge from under Russia’s shadow and become maybe a significant minor power in its own right.

As long as the Armenians under Russian sponsorship were able to occupy as a prisoner in the territory at the most one fifth of the entire country, then it was difficult for Azerbaijan to function and it made it questionable whether or not the Azerbaijanis could even qualify for the sort of investment that has generated the energy production that they have today, which has made Armenia a very weird place, because when you got a guy on the outside who doesn’t exactly have an interest in your own personal excellence, just using you as a pawn, and you know that there’s nothing economically or strategically or military or even diplomatically that you can really do to help yourself.

You kind of rest on their laurels. So for the last 30 years, Armenia has done really nothing but become poorer and less educated, more corrupt. The people with ambition and skills have left the country, but they remained active in the local politics, and so they would send money home and influence their new home countries in order to pressure international governments to help Armenia.

So the diaspora beyond Armenia became very, very robust in anti Azerbaijani operations, even though the Azerbaijanis were on the receiving end of the wars to this point. Well, that has all stopped as of the 20th of September. Azerbaijan has recaptured all of the territories lost, including an area called Nagorno-Karabakh, which is a sliver of mountainous territory, home to about 100,000 Armenians who it’s the best way to put this.

Nationalist Armenians consider Nagorno-Karabakh to be the birthplace of the Armenian nation, and it is now once again under Azerbaijani control. And as part of these forces surrenders to the Azerbaijanis, they have agreed already to be completely demilitarized. And the formal negotiations, which really at the end of a gun now to formally incorporate this into Azerbaijan proper with no autonomy have begun.

The end likelihood here is that the Azerbaijani will do to the Armenians the same thing the Armenians did to the Azerbaijanis and push them out so that they don’t have to worry about assimilating these people at all. There’ll be some drama in that later, but really all of the economic, diplomatic, strategic and military factors are now in play, and there’s really no where that the car of Armenians can go, and there’s only almost certainly that they can’t stay.

So it’s me. So let’s look at a map. Okay. We’re looking at a zoom in on the South Caucasus here. You’ve got southwestern Azerbaijan over there in the right and the bulk of Armenia over on the left. The capital of Armenia. Yerevan is just off the map right here. And the Russian military base that is officially in charge of guaranteeing Armenian security.

It’s a place called our Rumi. And I apologize, Armenians, I’m going to butcher all your names, but it’s actually off the side of the map. Like what? We’re about right here. Now, these green territories and these aquamarine territories, those are territories that the Azerbaijanis lost to the Armenians in the initial wars that happened as the Soviet Union was breaking up and culminating in a real hot war in 1994.

And these are territories the Azerbaijanis look to the international medias like look, they took a fifth of our territory. How can you not side with us? And the answer, of course, was the Armenian lobby in the United States and France are very, very powerful anyway. Bit by bit, we saw hotter and hotter circumstances until culminating in 2020 after years of the Turks providing the Azerbaijanis with military training and especially drones.

There was a lightning assault back in 2020 that lasted less than a month that basically obliterated every Armenian military asset that came into range of the Azerbaijani forces. And as part of the ceasefire, the Armenians had to give up the territories in green and the Azerbaijani just flat out conquered the aquamarine territories. And what that did is it left Nagorno, which is this little area, Nagorno-Karabakh, largely cut off.

There’s this little section down here called the locking corridor. And that was the only way that the Armenians were able to get supplies in and out. And so over the last two years, what the Azerbaijanis have done is they reestablished control of the real territories as they started impinging upon this access point. This is a very, very mountainous area and this map, obviously everything looks flat, but it was very easy for the Azerbaijanis to limit access.

And today, not only is there no functional road access, there’s no electricity going into Kabul as well, which is going to make it very, very easy for the Azerbaijanis to force the car of Armenians to be calm for Armenia proper or places elsewhere. So this whole zone, all of this which is now reclaimed territory, is Azerbaijani under international law, always has been, but now it’s under their de-facto control and they’re going to shape the cultures of the areas there to their liking, really with limited problems from anyone else.

Of course, just because this war is over doesn’t mean that all wars are over. And for the next trick, Azerbaijan has another problem. There’s this Exclave over here called Ivan Southern. Sorry, Azerbaijanis. I’m going to mispronounce your names too. And it is a again internationally recognized part of Azerbaijan. But as you can see, it’s not physically connected at all.

There’s a little sliver over here where it connects to Turkey, and that’s really their only link to the outside world, because there’s a de facto embargo in both ways and along this entire border, as well as along this entire border. So the next phase for the Azerbaijanis will be to assert some degree of control over this road here, or maybe even this road up here in order to get direct, unending access to their enclave.

Now the Armenian government realizes just how screwed they are, because that’s a couple of things here of change. Number one, the Turks have put their fingers on the scale with those drones, and that’s something the Armenians cannot stand up to at all. Second, the Russians, who have been at least nominally the security guarantors for the Armenians for the last several decades, well, they’re kind of busy in Ukraine.

They’ve actually thinned out the troops they have in Armenia, and they’ve proven completely incapable of helping the Armenians at all. So if you’re in Armenia and you realize that your eastern border with Azerbaijan is blocked and hostile, your western border with Turkey is blocked and hostile. And your northern one was with Georgia, who is at most going to be neutral.

And the Azerbaijanis are looking at cutting this link with Iran, which is your last remaining outlet. You’re on the verge of being landlocked and surrounded by hostile states on all sides. That’s not feasible for a country that has less than 3 million people and no economy to speak of. So they know they had to give up Nagorno-Karabakh and they know they have to accept the terms of Azerbaijan.

They know they have to be proactive in offering Azerbaijan access to their other enclave, which means all of a sudden you can get regular Turkish military going through the enclave, through southern Armenia, into Azerbaijan and back. They realize that the very existence of Armenia as a state is now physically under threat, and it’s only them rolling over very energetically that they might be able to throw themselves at the mercy of their would be conquerors.

That’s a problem. That’s a difficult position to be in. So the Armenian government has to go out of their way to find a way to make this work, because if they wait for Azerbaijan to be ready for the next conflict, they’re hosed. So the Armenian government has not simply quietly accepted all of the circumstances around them. And not only are they speaking with the Turks about normal relations, they have started ratifying the International Criminal Court conventions.

The idea, from their point of view, is that at least this way we get a layer of international law in place that might be able to protect Armenia as a state and Armenians who remain in trouble with some sort of international legal action. It’s a bit of a reach, but it’s all they’ve got to work with because the Russians are now useless.

But as part of ratifying the ICC, that means they have to abide by things like arrest warrants that the ICC issues and an arrest warrant has been issued for none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin. And I’m sure, I’m sure, I’m sure some of you guys are going to start screaming about the United States on this. The United States is not a signatory to the ICC.

This is the rest of the world because, you know, when you launch a war and start bombing civilians and setting up rape clinics, that’s usually considered legal. And so the security guarantor for the Armenians is now internationally wanted. And Armenia’s only road for that they can see means severing the relationship with the Russians completely. This is something they can do because they don’t have a choice.

Again, they’re ringed by potentially hostile countries. The only way that the Russians can bring forces in and out are, ironically, through those hostile countries Azerbaijan and more likely, Georgia. But the Georgians have a choice that the Russians are occupying, too. So that’s not exactly something that the Georgians are really eager to do. This is what it looks like when history starts moving again.

We’ve had three decades of the Russians holding this all at bay and it’s all breaking free all at once. And this isn’t the only place that Russian power is failing and allowing the logjam to finally break free. This isn’t the only place we’re going to be seeing rapid historical level shifts, and for the next one, we have to turn to Chechnya.

War Breaks Out Between Armenia and Azerbaijan

Well, my attempt at prepping a video this morning and getting ahead of a brewing war between Armenia and Azerbaijan has failed. Hostilities broke out within minutes of me finishing the recording, but here’s what’s what…

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:

First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.

Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.

And then there’s you.

Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.

Support medshare's ukraine fund
Support medshare's global efforts

Transcript

Good morning from Foggy, Asheville, North Carolina. Peter Zeihan here. And today we’re talking about some things that are going on with the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. Now, Armenia and Azerbaijan are two of the 15 post-Soviet republics. They were constituent parts of the Soviet Union, and they sell into war between the two of them, while the Soviet Union still existed gives you an idea of the depth of the animosity.

I could write a small book about the details of why they were warring, but the bottom line is, is that the two of them have an integrated geographic system, and the people that we today consider the Armenians, and to a lesser degree the Azerbaijanis, have kind of moved around throughout history. So the irredentist claims on each other’s territories are pretty robust, but most importantly, the access points to and from their core population centers intermingle.

And it’s very difficult for one of them to have security if the other one does. In the 1980s, the war basically took a pretty familiar form. The Armenians, using backing and security guarantees from the Russians, were able to launch a series of assaults on Azerbaijani positions and usually outmaneuver them not just because they had better trained troops and higher morale, but the Azerbaijani troops were honestly, completely incompetent.

And in the course of the war, Azerbaijan ultimately lost control of over a fifth of their territory, and a lot of that remains occupied by the Armenians today. The biggest change in the war happened a little over. Guns had been two years now. Yeah, it’s been about two years. When Azerbaijan got a hold of a bunch of Turkish combat drones and in a lightning conflict that lasted under a month, just decisively destroyed every Armenian force they came up against.

Now, a couple of things here. Number one, this was the first time we really saw drones in combat as a regular plank of military policy as opposed to just doing a little recon or assassinations here and there. It was the mainstay of the be Azerbaijani effort to the Azerbaijanis only had the drones as majority troops, maybe better trained, had better equipment that they did back during the war of the 1990s, but they’re still broadly incompetent.

So the Azerbaijanis were only able to follow up on those assaults in a very limited way. Which brings us to today. The we’ve had two big changes in circumstance. Number one, the Azerbaijanis have spent the last year turning up. The regular forces were still undoubtedly awful, but they’re not as awful as they used to be. And so if we were to see a repeat of the war of two years ago when the drones cleared the way the Azerbaijanis undoubtedly would be able to advance further and take more territory.

And they know it and the Armenians know it. On the other side of things, the Armenians security guarantor, the Russians is bogged down up to its eyeballs in Ukraine. Sorry for the mixed metaphor there. That’s all they got. And they’ve been steadily pulling troops out of every other operation that they’ve got everywhere. A lot of the African troops have been pulled back.

The the forces that the Russians used to keep on NATO’s borders have largely been relocated. There are other troops in the Caucasus that have been returned. As for the Russian forces in Armenia that are supposedly there to guarantee the secured their ally, you know, will they fight here and they fight. And is all their equipment still there? And do the Russians even have the capacity to think about getting involved in a secret military conflict?

Remember that Russian forces don’t have a land connection to Armenia. That’s direct. They have to go through either Georgia or Azerbaijan, two countries that obviously have a vested interest by happening. If they feel they can stand up to the Russians, which now they might. So if you were Armenia, your only solution here is to find another security guarantor.

And options are thin. Number one would be the United States, which would be a big push. But as a region or to get along pretty well with the Americans and anything that with the Americans is going to require some sort of return to the status before the war in the 1990s, which means the Army to give it up all the land that they’ve conquered.

That could get interesting. Number two is Turkey. But Turkey is a tight ally of Azerbaijan. So again, same problem that just leaves Iran. Now, Iran is Muslim, Armenia is Christian. But as geopolitics knows, no loyalties. The two of them have been de facto allies for most of the time since the post-Soviet collapse. Iran and the Russians, while they don’t always see eye to eye broadly, do see the Turks and the Americans as a problem.

And Azerbaijan is populated by Azerbaijanis, and the single largest ethnic minority in Iran are people of Azeri descent. So the Iranians have always been concerned about having an independent as region on their borders. Which brings us to an interesting little quirk here. The Armenian lobby in the United States is very powerful, not just because of culture. You know, this isn’t to share in the Kardashians.

It is very deeply rooted, certainly the USA’s State Department and into Hollywood. And as a result, usually the second, third or fourth largest single component of the U.S. aid budget has been going to Armenia. And that was established during the wars in the 1980s when it was the Armenians who were very clearly the aggressors. Cause it’s a potent force even today, especially in Congress, which means as Armenia is looking for alternatives, we’re going to see something really colorful in the United States.

We’re going to see the entrenched Armenian lobby going head to head with the entrenched anti-Iranian lobby, because the two of them on this topic are going to be diametrically opposed. And against all of this, you’ve got the Azerbaijanis trying to figure out what they can do next. Whenever you have a mountainous territory, it’s all about the access points.

There are very few places and a lot of mountain chains where you can run supplies or troops or transport or economics and you fight over those corridors. There are a couple of those corridors that are now in dispute or they were always in dispute, in hot dispute between the Armenians and the Asbjorn, is that if the Azerbaijanis get their way, they’re going to be able to cut a connection.

Really the only one that matters between Armenia and Iran altogether that can’t help but trigger a response from Tehran. And all of a sudden, U.S. policy is very interesting on this topic. It’s one of the weird things where domestic politics and foreign politics can merge in a way that is, well, delightfully lively. I don’t think that the Azerbaijanis are confident enough to do a general assault, but cutting a single corridor and putting a few troops in there and order to engage the Turks in the Americans responses.

Yeah, I can see that totally working. All right. That’s it for me. I’ll let you know more as I see it.

Ask Peter: Will Azerbaijan Try to Take Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia?

Armenia and Azerbaijan have some “history” together…and not in a good way. As the Ukraine War ramps up and stress is added to the Russian system, will we see the Armenians and Azerbaijanis creating some new history?

This conflict boils down to ethnic and religious differences and a shared desire to control the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. While both sides have proven their lack of skill on the battlefield, Armenia has been able to deter Azerbaijani assaults thanks to their “partnership” with Russia.

For the past 30 years, we haven’t seen much movement from Azerbaijan; this is to avoid jeopardizing their oil exports and risk retaliations from the Russians. But as Russia becomes overcommitted in its war on Ukraine, we might see some movement on this front.

The territories across the globe that have benefited from a Russian presence are all in a precarious situation. As soon as one domino falls, so will the rest…and the entire global position of the Russian Federation could be wrapped up in a matter of months. But will it be Azerbaijan that falls that first domino?

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TRANSCIPT

Hey everyone. Peter Zeihan here coming to you from the Docman trail, continuing with the Ask Peter series that was born out of my flight delay in Monterrey a few days ago. One of the other questions was about Armenia and Azerbaijan. The two of them have a well, let’s just say a history of not getting along. They fought several wars. And in the light of the Ukraine war, how do I see things unfolding? The not too distant future? This is going to be one of the really big hot spots as the Russian system falters. One of the things we have seen is that as the Russians put more and more of their men and material into the Ukraine conflict, they’re having to pull it from somewhere. And while they do have nearly bottomless reserves from the Soviet era, a lot of that stuff requires refurbishment and modernization before it can be thrown into combat. But any Russian equipment that is at a base somewhere else in the world can be brought home. And we’re seeing exactly that now in the case of Azerbaijan and Armenia.

The crux of the issue is that the Armenians are Christian, the Azerbaijanis are nominally Shia muslim. But really they’re kind of non-religious. And the two have been duking it over a chunk of territory called Nagorno-Karabakh. Now, the Armenians claim that Nagorno-Karabakh is the birthplace of their nation, which it’s not. But, you know, Armenia has a very nomadic history. They’ve wandered all around, he’s going to tell you in the Caucasus. But this is one of their older settlements. And so the belief that this is theirs is very real, very palpable, and is shared by the locals. The Azerbaijanis see this as part of their territory, as it has been since the 1920s, predating the Soviet period and in a war as a Soviet and was breaking up, the Armenians were able to take control of it. And the Armenian diaspora in the world, most notably in France, in the United States, was successful in getting a lot of Western aid, not to Azerbaijan, who was the victim of the war, but Armenia who launched it because of the whole Christian thing. The Armenians aren’t very good Christians either, but that’s a side issue in conflicts. Ever since the Russians have established a relationship with the Armenians. The Russians like to side with minorities who are surrounded by majorities very similar to the U.S. strategy in order to try groups apart. So in this case, they sided with the Armenians against the Azerbaijanis. It got them a military base just outside of Nagorno-Karabakh, where they have about 5000 troops. And now the Azerbaijanis are always concerned that should they launch a war to retake what they see as their territory, that the Russians will get involved and they’ll just absolutely get slammed.

Azerbaijan has half of its population in the city of Baku. Almost all of their exports are oil and they go by pipeline either through Russia or these days through Georgia and Turkey, going by another area that the Russians are backing called Ossetia in Georgia. And the Russians could break that line with ease. And so the role of the aggressor has traditionally been with Armenia, because Armenia feels rightly that it’s hiding under Russia’s skirts and can’t be hurt. Well, the map of that has changed a lot in the last two years. We now have two things that have shifted. Number one, the Russians are overcommitted in Ukraine and have actually drained some of their supplies and a few of their troops from Armenia, as well as their bases in Georgia. In order to keep the Ukraine war rolling. Second, the technological suite has shifted. The Armenians and especially Azerbaijanis, are dealing with old Soviet equipment that were the hand-me-downs from the Soviet Union. The Soviets or the Russians hung on to their better stuff and left some of the crap out in the provinces. And the Azerbaijanis have proven over and over and over again that they are absolutely incompetent fighters, especially when it comes to infantry and or tank warfare. And the Armenians are just wipe the floor with them because they’ve been in a superior morale position. They’ve had the high ground and they have more support from abroad independent of Russia. What has changed, though, is that the Azerbaijanis and the Turks are friends. They’re the same similar ethnic group and the Turks have become world leaders in small drone technology. And the Turkish drones have proven excellent at taking out armored tanks and aircraft guns and the like. So in a military conflict back in 2019, now summer 2019, there is about a one month long war where the Azerbaijanis, using almost exclusively drones, rolled into parts of Nagorno-Karabakh and just blew the Armenian position to pieces, destroying almost their entire air defense network. The only part that survived is the part the Armenians turned off any tanks that were in the area. And by the time we got to the third week of the war, there was so little hardware to go after they started targeting people and the result was an absolute route that for the first time since 1992 saw the Azerbaijani is actually gain ground and quite a bit and now with the Russians overcommitted in Ukraine, the question is how long it will be until the Azerbaijanis move again.

So one of the things that people forget is between 1993 and today, the Armenian economy really didn’t change in size. It was basically a very corrupt system. It had an old nuclear power plant that the Russians maintained for them badly, I might add. And there was a lot of money that came in from the diaspora. While they were doing that, the Azerbaijanis were very successful at going out and courting foreign investment and they brought in tens of billions of it. And over the course of the last 30 years they’ve grown from this provincial backwater economy that was basically based on caviar to being a major oil and natural gas exporter. And so today, the Azerbaijani economy is roughly a factor of 25 larger than that of Armenia, and their defense budget is larger than Armenia’s entire GDP. So there’s still no reason to expect our Azerbaijani troops to be very good, but their equipment is now becoming interesting. What that means moving forward is as it becomes apparent or if it becomes apparent that the Russians really are losing in Ukraine and they are all in, then other entities around the world are going to take action in places where the Russians have held them at bay. And I think the single most likely place for that to happen is negative, horrible, because as soon as the Azerbaijanis feel they can get their land back without suffering reprisals, I’m pretty sure they’re going to take it.

So for those of you who want to like, you know, encourage this to happen, the play is in Azerbaijan. If you can do defense cooperation in Azerbaijan, like we have done in Ukraine for the last several years, that would raise the cost to Moscow of any sort of reprisal anyway. It’s a cold war that is turning warm and very soon is likely to turn hot. And it’s going to have some very big implications. Once one of these dominoes falls somewhere, everyone else around the world is going to realize that the Russians really can’t do anything. And then the entire global position of the Russian Federation will be wrapped up in a matter of months.

Alright. See you next time.