Foreign Policy: If Aliyev’s threats are implemented, Armenia’s south will be turned into a gray zone under the military control of Russia and Azerbaijan
Georgia is now deeply polarized by geopolitical divisions between Russia and the West. Should Georgia’s democratic slide continue, the rest of the South Caucasus will feel the negative impact, especially with creeping dictatorship in neighboring Azerbaijan and a challenge to democratic consolidation in neighboring Armenia, Foreign Policy writes.
As noted, reliant on its hub-and-spoke network of bilateral alliances, of which Georgia was one, Washington has lacked a coherent approach to the Eurasian continent since the Soviet collapse. The result is that the U.S. alliance system’s ability to withstand authoritarian coordination by China and Russia is weakening. Pivoting on specific states, without a broader continental approach and blueprints for regional integration, will only strengthen the local elites and undercut U.S. power in this challenging continent.
A continental strategy should involve fostering economic integration and connectivity across subregions such as the South Caucasus and Central Asia—which means promoting the creation of trade and transit routes and establishing clear rules for their operation. However, Washington is still playing defense in the South Caucasus. Azerbaijan, an autocratic petrostate, has succeeded in keeping the West out and Russia in. President Ilham Aliyev’s repeated threats to carve an extraterritorial Zangezur corridor in Armenia’s south aim to create a sanctions-proof, overland Middle Corridor.
If successful, this plan would turn Armenia’s south into a gray-zone entrepôt, overseen militarily by Russia and Azerbaijan. Opaque to the United States, this would connect Russia and Iran, giving China a new route to its Anaklia deep-water port facility, which is under construction on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. In addition to sabotaging Washington’s diplomacy directed at opening trade and transit routes in the region, Baku also derides the EU civilian monitors on Armenia’s borders. Aliyev and Russian President Vladimir Putin also champion regional formats of engagement that are specifically designed to exclude the Euro-Atlantic powers.
Indeed, Russia is likely to compensate its losses in the Middle East by pushing harder in the South Caucasus, where it has been losing ground since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In the short term, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump can continue Biden’s policies of open regionalism and continental connectivity. This entails deepening the currently limited U.S. support to Armenia’s Crossroads for Peace initiative, an effort to enhance broad-based regional connectivity. This promises to generate economic benefits to the South Caucasus while reducing Russia’s influence over the region.
This initiative can also turn the United States into a key player in Eurasian connectivity, giving Washington transparent and diversified access to Central and South Asia. To this end, leaning on Turkey to open its border with Armenia could have far-reaching regional and continental effects, diminishing Russia’s control over trade and transit routes.
In the long term, the U.S. president-elect can rewrite the forms of democratic assistance to countries in such regions. Allocating funding designed specifically for building cross-border collaboration or cultivating professional networks across the region can address the problem of regional fracture in Eurasia. And just as importantly, offering political and financial support for trilateral governance between Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, under the U.S. umbrella, will allow Washington to have predictable connectivity to Central Asia and South Asia—perennial goals for successive administrations since the end of the Cold War. Washington has done it in the postwar Balkans and can do so again in postwar Caucasus.
