The announcement of an agreement to end the recent bloody strife between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the status of Nagorno‐Karabakh, the ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan, should be greeted with cautious relief. Caution is warranted, since three previous cease fires that Russia brokered failed to endure. This time, though, Moscow’s diplomatic efforts seem more insistent and effective. The new trilateral accord goes far beyond a mere cease fire and provides for revised political arrangements that reduce Nagorno-Karabakh’s de facto autonomy. Moreover, another provision authorizes enforcement of the settlement by Russian (and possibly Turkish) peacekeeping troops. Perhaps the biggest benefit is that a peace agreement, however imperfect, reduces the danger of a clash between Russia and Turkey, Azerbaijan’s principal patron, and the risk that another regional power, Iran, could be drawn into the fighting.
For understandable reasons, the agreement is widely viewed as a defeat for Armenia, despite its long‐standing status as Russia’s client. The eruption of violent demonstrations in Armenia’s capital confirmed that there is extensive anger at Moscow’s stance and the Armenian government’s capitulation. However, the military situation on the ground already had shifted badly against Armenia’s position, with the biggest blow coming just days ago when Azeri troops gained control of Nagorno-Karabakh’s second largest city. Unless Russia was willing to conduct a large‐scale intervention with its own troops, a diplomatic accord was the only feasible alternative—even if the substance of the agreement was to Armenia’s disadvantage.
Moscow’s behavior during this crisis should undermine two corrosive myths in international affairs. One is that Russia is a rogue power bent on aggrandizing its position regionally and globally regardless of costs and risks. The extreme version of this thesis is that Vladimir Putin is the second coming of Adolf Hitler, but even milder versions assume that Russia is an aggressively revisionist power. The new agreement to end the fighting in the southern Caucasus points to a very different conclusion. In this case, Putin’s government placed a premium on restoring order and preventing an escalation that could draw Russia into a murky conflict with serious potential risks and costs. The Kremlin was willing to do so even when the agreement sacrificed some interests of a political and security client state. In other words, Russia behaved as a rather typical great power intent on preserving peace and stability in its sphere of influence.
The other myth that should be consigned to the dustbin is that without direct, extensive U.S. involvement (under the rubric of U.S. “global leadership”), the international system cannot function effectively. Global interventionists insist that the choice is a binary one: a dominant U.S. role or widespread chaos. Yet with respect to the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Washington’s involvement was purely diplomatic and occurred only on the margins. Russia was the principal external actor, and it played a generally constructive role. Members of the U.S. foreign policy elite who embrace Madeleine Albright’s infamous expression of national narcissism—that the United States is the “indispensable nation”—must acknowledge that reasonable alternatives exist in an increasingly multipolar world.
