It took Russian troops just hours to spread out across Nagorno-Karabakh after Azerbaijani leader Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan agreed to a ceasefire on Nov. 9, ending the 45-day war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. The ability to station troops in Nagorno-Karabakh fulfilled an outcome which the Kremlin had sought since the early 1990s.
For Armenians, the war’s outcome is a disaster. While they held their own against an Azerbaijani invasion for 40 days, they largely collapsed in the final five days. In the end, what tipped the balance was not Azerbaijan, but the fact that the Armenians were outgunned — not by Azerbaijan, but by Israel and Turkey who provided Azerbaijan with several billion dollars in drones which Baku, Jerusalem, and Ankara used to terrifying effect. Turkey also put into Azerbaijan’s service F-16s and brought Syrian Arab mercenaries from Idlib and elsewhere. As for the United States, it has provided oil-rich Azerbaijan with approximately $100 million in military equipment between 2018 and 2019, sales possible only after the State Department signed a waiver saying that Azerbaijan would adhere to a diplomatic process to resolve its conflict with Armenia.
Either the State Department deliberately defied U.S. law or there was a tremendous intelligence failure; either way, Congress should be outraged.
In the end, Armenians lost territory they consider their historical and cultural heartland and now must accommodate tens of thousands of displaced persons and refugees. Anger is palpable across Yerevan as Armenians digest the outcome and might threaten the democratic progress Armenia has made over the past two years.
Armenia and the Caucasus more broadly might not be front-and-center in the American strategic calculus, but U.S. officials have some serious soul-searching to do. For nearly three decades, the U.S. has sought to resolve the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict through the Minsk Group, which Russia, the U.S., and France jointly chair. It was an investment in multilateralism that had paid dividends. There was broad consensus on a solution, which was almost implemented until Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev, without explanation, reversed course.
The basis for the agreement was always land for peace. Locals would have the autonomy and freedom they sought and for which they had voted. With the agreement at hand, the threat of military assaults and ethnic cleansing lifted and confidence slowly being rebuilt, Armenia would evacuate districts recognized as Azerbaijani, which separated Armenia from Armenian-populated areas in Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijanis displaced by the 1988 to 1994 Nagorno-Karabakh War would also then return to Azeri districts. There would, of course, also be a role for international peacekeepers. However, the Minsk Group agreed that these would neither come from the Minsk Group chairs nor neighbors — in other words, no Russians, Americans, French, or Turks. Instead, there was broad consensus that Scandinavian troops would separate the combatants. Behind-the-scenes, Washington and Paris were already working with Scandinavian ministries of defense to recruit the peacekeepers.
That changed with the ceasefire. Progressives may criticize U.S. unilateralism, but Russia is the true unilateralist, as its landgrabs in Georgia and Ukraine already show. In this case, Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown Russia’s involvement in the Minsk process to be insincere from the start. That the U.S. did not recognize this is yet one more intelligence failure exposed by the Nagorno-Karabakh debacle. At the very least, the State Department should question its trust in any other diplomatic framework in which Russia is a partner.
Decades of Minsk Group diplomacy are now out the window. Azerbaijani dictator Aliyev’s Borat-like, triumphalist rhetoric, capped by his bragging that Azerbaijan had regained its disputed districts without making any commitment to the status of Nagorno-Karabakh, means that there is no longer any incentive for Azerbaijan to make peace with neighboring Armenia, nor will Aliyev foreswear a settlement that is not based on ethnic cleansing.
The fighting might be over, but the crisis should put two issues before the Congress: U.S. aid to Azerbaijan and the intelligence failures that underlie events. Specifically, Congress should immediately end any Section 907 waiver allowing aid to Azerbaijan. Baku lied to the U.S., and no amount of interference from pro-Azerbaijan interest groups should enable Aliyev to make an end-run around U.S. law.
The intelligence failures might be more difficult to address, but they should not be swept under the rug. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Oversight Committee, and their House corollaries must consider two questions: How did the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Defense officials working with Azeris, and the intelligence community more broadly get Aliyev’s intentions so wrong? At a minimum, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun should explain the process that led to his signature on the latest waiver enabling military aid to Azerbaijan. More broadly, U.S. diplomats involved in the Minsk Group, as well as the intelligence community, should participate in an after-action inquiry before Congress to determine whether Russian participation in the Minsk process was simply a mechanism for the Kremlin to distract from more unilateral goals. It is time for some serious soul-searching.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
