Closing the Ring

Of the many reasons why NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine is a bad idea, the worst must surely be that these two states would immediately add intractable instabilities to the alliance’s list of unmanageables. Abkhazia , Transnistria , Crimea — just to list these statelets, pseudostates, and autonomous regions is to pound into the ground glaring warning signs in every NATO language.

Thus it’s been particularly awkward a go of things post-9/11 for Turkey — a NATO member not to be disposed of, but one stuck out like a finger along the ragged frontier of the rule of law. An envious position it is not to border Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, and Georgia, to say nothing of Kurdistan, the vast region overlapping Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and some of the Caucasus states, and perennial source of trouble characterized alternately as guerilla, insurgent, and terrorist.

Adding to the regional woe is the longstanding enmity tangling Armenia with Azerbaijan on the one hand and Armenia and Turkey on the other. The former situation has been dominated by the saga of another statelet, Nagorno-Karabakh , nominally a part of Azerbaijan but situated entirely behind the Armenian border. The latter situation has been dominated by the memory and legacy of genocide. Now, the lower Caucasus is a fairly uninviting and remote place — no Winter Games to be held here anytime soon — but the corridor running from Basra to Baku has been a bloody and dangerous one indeed. A separate post, or book, could be written on the significance of Azerbaijan to the West — economically, politically, culturally geostrategically — but my comment today is restricted to the significance of Turkish-Armenian relations to the significance of Azerbaijan. To wit, this scrap of good news:

In reaching the agreement, Turkey also won a commitment from Washington to accelerate its efforts to settle the dispute over the breakaway territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is inside Azerbaijan, a Turkish ally, but is under ethnic Armenian control.

What agreement, you say? Why, a long-in-the-works but nonetheless surprising clearing of the decks and diplomatic reconciliation between Turkey and Armenia , quietly guided and shaped in its final phases by the Obama administration. The development strikes me as key to closing off as much as possible of the instability and discord that can afflict, and infect, the southerly portion of the West’s eastern frontier. I only hope Obama does not try to replicate this fairly stunning and important success in Kashmir. Pakistan and India are not Turkey and Armenia, not by a long shot; imagine if Turkey and Armenia had populations on par with ours, nuclear weapons, and a Nagorno-Karabakh of their own between them, and you can begin to grasp the depth of the differences. Importantly, Turkey and Armenia appear largely to have come to resolution of their own accord, with the US popping in from time to time to massage or reinforce things. Pakistan and India? Not so much. I daresay the boring of the Taliban into the belly of Pakistan raises a bit more concern these days than the future of Kashmir anyhow.