The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ask Peter: Will Azerbaijan Try to Take Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

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? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/ask-peter-will-azerbaijan-try-to-take-nagorno-karabakh-from-armenia

Hey, everyone, Peter Zine here coming to you from the Dockman Trail, continuing with the Ask Peter series that was born out of my flight delay in Monterey a few days ago. One of the other questions was about Armenian-Azerijan. The two of them have, well, let's just say, a history of not getting along. They've 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 hotspots as the Russian system falters. One of the things we have seen is that as the Russians put more and more of their men in 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 Azerbaijani's are nominally Shia Muslim, but really they're kind of non-Rexamines. religious. And the two have been duking it over a chunk of territory called Nagorno-Karabha. Now, the Armenians claim that Nagorno-Karabah is the birthplace of their nation, which it's not, but, you know, Armenia has a very nomadic history. They've wandered all

around eastern Anatolia and 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 Azerbaijani's see this as part of their territory, as it has been since the 1920s, predating the Soviet period, and in a war, as the Soviet Union was breaking up, the Armenians were able to take control of it, and the Armenian diaspora in the world, most notably in France and 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 pry groups apart. So in this case, they sided with the Armenians against the Azerbaijani's. It got them a military base just outside of Nagorno-Karabarabah, where they have about 5,000 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 then they'll just absolutely get slammed. Asabijan 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 Assetsia in Georgia, and the Russians could break that line with ease. And so the role of the aggressor is traditionally being with Armenia, because Armenia feels rightly that it's hiding under Russia's skirts and can't be hurt. Well, the math 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 the Azerbaijanis are dealing with old Soviet

equipment that were the hand-me-downs from the Soviet Union. The Soviets or the Russians hung onto their better stuff and left some of the crap out in the provinces. And the Azerbaijani's 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 have just wiped 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 Azerbaijani's 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, anti-aircraft guns, and the like. So in a military conflict back in, God, was it 2019 now, summer 2019, there was about a one-month-long war where the Azerbaijan's, using almost exclusively drones, rolled into parts of Nagorno-Karabah

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 Azerbaijanis actually gain ground on quite a bit and now with the Russians overcommitted in Ukraine the question is how long it will be until the Azerbaijan's move again see 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

and 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 Azerbaijani's 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 be in 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. higher 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 have, is Nagorno Karaba, 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 fall 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. All right, see you next time.