What Was The Impact Of 2020’s Overlooked War?
War and pestilence are often mentioned together as two of the most primal sources of destruction mankind has experienced in its history. 2020, perhaps the most disastrous year in recent memory, has given humanity far more than it bargained for of both. Pestilence, a synonym of plague or disease, has taken up the lion’s share of the attention this year, in the form of- what else- the COVID-19 pandemic that has spread worldwide from its origins in Wuhan, China. But, overshadowed by the pandemic is the fact that 2020 has been marked by the violence of war in ways that will meaningfully reshape global geopolitics for years to come.
The pandemic has so dominated global discourse and media coverage that it is very easy to forget that one of the seminal events of early 2020 before COVID was the assasination by the United States of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. This incident marked the beginning of ratcheted-up tensions between the United States and the Islamic Republic, and was not even the last such assassination conducted against Iran by the U.S. or its allies this year.
The increase in hostility against Iran prompted the Islamic Republic to increase development of its nuclear program, even with Donald Trump (notably more hostile towards Iran than his predecessor Barack Obama) due to be replaced in office next year by Joe Biden, who has pledged to attempt to resurrect Obama’s Iran deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015).
Biden and his administration’s prospects for actually pulling this off appear to be difficult; Iran has said that it will only return to honoring its end of the deal if the incoming Biden administration lifts all sanctions. Biden’s foreign policy team, headlined by Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken (a “vociferous defender” of the JCPOA) may find executing such a removal of sanctions difficult even if they are fully committed to such an approach- particulary if the Senate remains under Republican control pending two special elections in Georgia which will take place in early January.
If the Biden team may want to put out the fires that Trump started with Iran, the state of Israel seems to want to do everything possible to ensure the fires of diplomatic tension stay blazing hot. In late November of 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of Iran’s foremost if not the foremost leading nuclear scientists, was assassinated. Iran quickly blamed Israel for the killing, an allegation that appears to have been confirmed by an American official.
Benjamin Netanyahu may have congratulated Joe Biden on his election victory and earned the ire of Donald Trump- who has long trumpeted the actions he has taken on behalf of the Jewish state, namely moving the United States embassy to Jerusalem and formally recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan heights. However, the killing of Fakhrizadeh may be a sign that Netanyahu will not easily facilitate Biden’s aims of detente with the Islamic Republic, and in fact his government’s actions will likely pose the biggest single barrier besides a Republican Senate to any new deal between the United States and Iran.
But where the tensions between the United States, Israel and Iran merely hint at the possibility of war, 2020 also saw outright war break out between the neighboring countries of Armenia and Azerbaijan, both located in the South Caucasus region, where the continents of Europe and Asia collide. For most of the 20th century, both of these countries were constituent republics of the Soviet Union, and the breakup of that communist empire in 1991, while doubtless a relief to many in those two nations, sowed the seeds for the recurring dispute that would erupt in full force in 2020.
That dispute was and is over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which until this year had been occupied by Armenia, but claimed by Azerbaijan. Under Soviet rule, this region had been majority Armenian but with a large Azeri minority, and had been under the jurisdiction of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). Even before the official breakup of the USSR, in the late 1980s the Armenian and Azeri SSRs were already at loggerheads over the territory, with protests beginning in 1988 among ethnic Armenians in the territory calling for unity with the Armenian SSR.
From there, tensions only escalated and exacerbated. In December 1991, just weeks before the Soviet Union itself would be dissolved, the Karabakh Armenians held a referendum on joining with Armenia, that was boycotted by the territory’s ethnic Azerbaijanis. This led to the start of a full-blown armed conflict between the two newly independent states of Azerbaijan and Armenia over the territory, with Armenia supported by the newborn Russian Federation and Azerbaijan supported by most of the Muslim world, including mujahedin fighters battle-hardened in the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s.
The conflict would continue from 1991 on to 1994, with Armenia gradually gaining the upper hand and even pushing the fight into Azerbaijan proper, taking 14 percent of Azerbaijani territory by the spring of 1994. In May of that year, Azerbaijan had no choice but to agree to the terms of a ceasefire, brokered by the Russian Federation, that de facto recognized Armenian control over the territory. This would mark the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, but the seeds of future conflict would remain.
During the next two and a half decades, sporadic border clashes and unrest would mark the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh. Since roughly the time of the first war’s end, Azerbaijan has been governed by the Aliyev family, first by Heydar Aliyev (a general in the Azeri KGB during the Soviet era), and then by his son Ilham Aliyev. The younger Aliyev, who assumed power from his father months before Heydar succumbed to illness in 2003, has cannily leveraged Azerbaijan’s strategic geographical position (and the natural resources it provides) to his maximum benefit, in recent years balancing relations among the various regional players.
Aliyev’s strongest foreign relationship has been with Turkey and its authoritarian-minded President, Reccep Tayyip Erdogan. However, he has also maintained strong ties with Israel even as relations between that country and Turkey, while paradoxically also becoming closer to Iran- the two peoples share a majority adherence to Shia Islam, while Azeris make up Iran’s largest ethnic minority. Finally, since the end of the first war both the elder and younger Aliyevs have also fostered warmer relations with Russia, in contrast to their more hostile predecessor, with Aliyev and his wife frequent visitors to Moscow.
Meanwhile, until recent years Armenia had also increased its ties with Russia as well. In January of 2015, Armenia acceded to the Eurasian Economic Union, a bloc of mostly former Soviet states conceived in some ways as a Russian-led alternative to the European Union. Since 1992, Armenia has also been militarily allied to Russia as part of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a mutual defense pact between several of the post-Soviet states. However, events leading up to and including the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict would pose an unprecedented test to Russo-Armenian relations.
2018 would see political changes in Armenia that would, in part, set the stage for the conflict of 2020. Propelled by a series of street protests dubbed “the Velvet Revolution,” a young, supposedly reform-minded new Prime Minister would come to power in Armenia named Nikol Pashinyan. Pashinyan promised a sweeping away of entrenched political corruption and an orientation of Armenia towards Western Europe, a departure from Armenia’s historic stance in the post-Soviet era. However, he did take steps to reassure Moscow early in his tenure, meeting with Vladimir Putin just months into his tenure to proclaim he favored closer ties with Russia.
Nevertheless, over the ensuing two years, Pashinyan’s government did take a number of hostile actions towards its ostensible closest ally. A tax fraud investigation was launched into Russian state-owned energy behemoth Gazprom, and pro-Russian political figures such as former President Robert Kocharyan and retired Armenian Army general and former CSTO chief Yuriy Kachaturov faced criminal investigations as well.
Simultaneously, Pashinyan moved to install his own people in key positions throughout the country’s national security apparatus, including the 29 year old Argishti Kyaramyan as head of the National Security Service (the country’s main intelligence and domestic security agency) in June of 2020. In retrospect, the timing of appointing new and inexperienced (in the case of Kyaramyan at least, if not others) figures to such important security positions may have backfired considering Armenia’s military performance in Nagorno-Karabakh.
September of 2020 would see the uneasy situation in Nagorno-Karabakh return to a full scale conflict on a level not seen in the region since the early 1990s. According to official reports, Azerbaijan launched new military incursions into the territory starting on September 27. According to that country’s Ministry of Defence, by October 7 it had captured the district of Jabrayil and was “has full dominance before the enemy.”
Although Azerbaijan had taken the offensive first in this new iteration of the conflict, they cited as justification the fact that past United Nations resolutions dating back to the first conflict demanded Armenia withdraw troops from Nagorno-Karabakh, with Armenia having failed to ever comply. In any case, the Azeri military came into the conflict well equipped with weapons purchased from Israel and Turkey, giving its forces the upper hand in the early stages of the conflict.
Russia now found itself thrust into the position of mediating between the two warring ex-Soviet states, with longtime Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov hosting ceasefire talks between his Armenian and Azeri counterparts in Moscow. An initial truce agreement was reached on October 10, although minor clashes would not fully cease and the violence would not be truly contained for long. Hostilities would escalate again towards the end of October, and the following month would then see the conflict’s climactic battle and (mostly) final resolution.
That climax would take place around the city of Shusha, a Karabakh mountain town that has a long history as an Azeri cultural center. Beginning on November 4th, Azeri special forces led a successful effort to drive Armenian forces out of the town, with Azerbaijan’s President Aliyev announcing his forces’ victory in the area by November 8th. The battle signaled a decisive victory for Azerbaijan in the overall conflict.
Two days later, on November 10, the Pashinyan government in Armenia agreed to a new ceasefire, again brokered by Russia. The agreement was, for all intents and purposes, a surrender by Armenia. Under the terms, Azerbaijan was to keep the territory in Nagorno-Karabakh that it had conquered from Armenia, with Armenia to evacuate and hand over additional districts in the territory as well. The remaining Armenian controlled territory in the area was now only linked to Armenia proper by a small strip of land called the Lachin corridor- the security of this corridor would be guaranteed by a Russian peacekeeping force for a period of five years.
In the eyes of many Armenians, this was a humiliation, and Pashinyan’s poor leadership was responsible. Eurasianet reported that in the aftermath of the conflict, Pashinyan’s alienation of Armenia’s traditional ally Russia was held as at least part of the reason for the country’s poor military performance, and opinion polls reported that attitudes towards Russia among the Armenian public have grown more favorable, even as protests erupted demanding Pashinyan resign.
The military defeat of his government may well have damaged Pashinyan’s credibility with his people beyond repair- however, it remains to be seen under what circumstances exactly he will depart office, and under what timetable. The opposition protest movement is divided without clear leadership, and it is unclear that even Russia actually wants Pashinyan to be forcibly removed from power.
Writing in the column linked above titled “should Armenia’s Pashinyan be overthrown or remain in power,” Russia-based geopolitical analyst Andrew Korybko expresses ambivalence on the above question, but leans on the side of Pashinyan remaining being preferable to the instability that could result from his being forced to depart from office. Maintaining stability in the region does seem to be the top priority for Russia at the moment, and Korybko observes that Pashinyan being replaced by “ultra-nationalist” forces within Armenia would not be a palatable outcome for Moscow, as that might cause a reopening of hostilities with Azerbaijan in an attempt to regain control over Nagorno-Karabakh.
In any case, his fortunes as a rising leader in the region seem to have been halted dead in its tracks, and there is a good chance (although far from fully determined) that Armenia’s political orientation will once again turn in a more Eurasia-friendly direction. As Eurasianet (which, despite its name, is a pro-Western outlet) has already noted in the aforementioned article, public opinion does seem to be shifting in that direction, and Pashinyan made some personnel changes in his government to that effect, such as removing the perceived anti-Russian Kyaramyan from his post at the National Security Service.
On the other side, what now is to become of the newly ascendant victor Azerbaijan, its leader Aliyev, and its principal patron state of Turkey? Azerbaijan has gained the military and political prestige of gaining back territory that it has claimed for decades, and Turkey has also asserted itself as one of the region’s principal power brokers, as, in the aftermath of the conflict, Turkish peacekeepers will also be deployed to the region. Reccep Tayyip Erdogan has long been accused of harboring “neo-Ottoman” ambitions, that is, of holding the aim to restore Turkey to the status of great power in the Middle East. If that is indeed Turkey’s goal, then its influence will certainly have been bolstered by the outcome of the conflict.
All in all, it is a testament to what a calamitous year 2020 was that a major war played out in one of the most famously volatile regions of the world seems like an afterthought compared to COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 elections- especially in the United States. But how the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and its aftermath played out may have broader geopolitical significance beyond the immediate environs of the Caucasus.
The fact that the United States, until very recently the “world’s policeman” played a negligible role in the resolution of the conflict could simply be a regional outlier- after all, Russia played a leading role in resolving the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in the 1990s when it was much weaker than it is today. However, it comes at the tail end of an era where, under the America First mindset of Donald Trump, the United States is seen as less of a global leader (though it remains more assertive on the international stage than either supporters or detractors of Trump will care to admit). The incoming Biden administration will likely make it its mission to reverse this trend, but they may find- for better or worse- that the genie of American withdrawal may not be able to go back into the bottle.
