Again, Armenia could have played a role in these ambitious infrastructure projects attempting to further integrate Eurasia; instead the paths of development will simply be routed around Armenia.

As fas as I’ve seen, Armenia has received no reward or commitment from the West for poisoning its relationship with Russia. The European Investment Bank just announced a grant for 10 million euros to improve education in Armenia. And at the recent Granada summit European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the EU will provide $5.53m in emergency aid on top of a similar amount previously announced. Maybe Armenia got a secret promise to join the EU in about 15 years? If not, the EU simply said, “Here’s a cool 20 million for mortgaging your future and making your former allies hate you. Keep up the good work.”

The EU and Armenia are now practically begging Aliyev to meet with them. Pashinyan even just started pushing his planfor regional cooperation called Crossroads of Peace, which would see Azerbaijan and Turkiye reopen their land borders with Armenia and connect through several routes passing through the country. The problem is no one is listening. Aliyev has said Azerbaijan no longer needs Armenia; they’ll just work with Iran instead. Azerbaijan took control of Nagorno-Karabakh, it will soon have its corridor to its exclave and more direct route to Turkiye, and it plays a central role in burgeoning north-south and east-west trade routes.

Azerbaijan also knows that the EU is afraid to do anything in defense of Armenia because it has fired all its bullets at Russia. There is no appetite among European leaders to sanction Azerbaijan, which is increasingly an important source of oil and natural gas for the EU. According to Al Jazeera, French President Emmanuel Macron said that while Azerbaijan seemed to have “a problem with international law”, steps such as sanctions would not be productive. Unfortunately for the inept EU leaders, due to Russian companies’ large investments in the Azerbaijani oil and gas sector, it is one of the bigger beneficiaries of Brussels’ efforts to increase energy imports from Azerbaijan in order to replace Russian supplies. Azerbaijan is also importing more Russian gas itself in order to meet its obligations to Europe.

It really fucking sucks that Azerbaijan will receive no meaningful punishment for ethnically cleansing over a hundred thousand people. But I guess if you're Iran, you just have to be like "Fine, whatever, the long-term goal by America here is to promote a big war in the region that disrupts our future trade routes, so we'll try and avoid that." Additionally, if there was any appetite in Iran for a conflict, October 7th would have dramatically shifted priorities - sure, this is also a big war in the region to get engulfed in, but victory here would mean so much more than victory over Azerbaijan and/or Turkey. Especially as Israel supplied Azerbaijan with weapons. You potentially get to supplant Israel and become the regional power in the Middle East.

Not like Russia was doing much to help them whilst Karabakh was happening. With allies like those..