The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - War Breaks Out Between Armenia and Azerbaijan || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

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...Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/war-breaks-out-between-armenia-and-azerbaijan

Good morning from foggy Asheville, North Carolina. Peter Zion here. And today we're going to talk about some things that are going on with the Armenians and the Azerbaijani's. 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're a 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 less degree of the Azerbaijani, have kind of moved around throughout history. So the irritantus 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 the enough security, if the other one does. In the 1990s, 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 out-maneuver them, not just because they had better-trained troops in high 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, It's 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 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 Asbury The Azerbaijani effort. Two, the Azerbaijani's only had the drones. Asbrajani troops may be better trained and have better equipment that they did back during the war in the 1990s, but they're still broadly incompetent. So the Azerbaijani's were only able to follow up on those assaults in a very limited way, which brings us to today.

We've had two big changes in circumstance. Number one, the Azerbaijanis have spent the last year training up the regular forces. They're still undoubtedly awful. 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 Azerbaijani's undoubtedly would be able to advance further and take more territory. And they know it, and the Armenians know it. And second, the Armenian security guarantor, the Russians, is bogged up, down the... On the other side,

the Armenian security guarantor, the Armenian... On the other side of things, the Armenians' security year into where the Russians is bogged down up to its eyeballs in Ukraine. Sorry for the mixed metaphor there. That's all I 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 forces that the Russians used to keep on NATO's borders have largely been relocated. There are other troops in the caucuses that have been returned.

As for the Russian forces in Armenia that are supposedly there to guarantee to secure their ally, you know, will they fight? Can they fight? And is all their equipment still there? And do the Russians even have the capacity to think about getting involved in a second 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 to countries that obviously have a vested interest in that not happening if they feel they can stand up to the Russians, which now they might. So if you are Armenia, you're 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 Azerbaijan already gets 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 Armenia giving 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's 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 been.

always been concerned about having an independent as Brazian 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 just sharing the Kardashians. It is very deeply wound itself into the U.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 1990s

when it was the Armenians who were very clearly the aggressors. 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 Azerbaijani's trying to figure 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, well, they were always in dispute, in hut dispute, between the Armenians and the Azerbaijani's. And if the Azerbaijani's 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. politics get very interesting on this topic. It's one of those weird things where domestic politics and foreign politics can merge in a way that is,

well, delightfully lively. I don't think that the Azerbaijani's are confident enough to do a general assault, but cutting a single corridor and putting a few troops in there in order to engage the Turks and 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.