There were no cookies for Armenia’s impassioned pro-democracy demonstrators; instead, they took a good beating from U.S.-trained riot police, when Assistant Secretary of State James O’Brien touched down in Yerevan to meet Armenia’s beleaguered and increasingly authoritarian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. When O’Brien’s predecessor in the job, Victoria Nuland, toured Kyiv’s Maidan Square during the anti-government protests in late 2013, she famously handed out cookies to the protestors. But in Yerevan in 2024, the goodies were all for the prime minister. The announcement by the hard-nosed O’Brien of an American-Armenian strategic partnership signaled that more gifts would be forthcoming.
O’Brien’s high-profile visit, coming less than a month after that of the CIA’s Deputy Director David Cohen, signaled Washington’s continuing support for Pashinyan. The prime minister, once a rabble-rousing, populist journalist, was catapulted into power in 2018 by a Washington-backed ‘Velvet Revolution.’ Today’s demonstrators are trying to emulate the regime change operation and dethrone him, this time without Washington’s support.
Pashinyan is a valuable American asset in the South Caucasus—an explosive, geopolitically fragmented region hosting Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Iran, along with neighboring Russia and Turkey. This isthmus separating the Black and Caspian Seas, with Armenia located in the middle, is becoming an increasingly important front in the escalating contest between Moscow and Washington for ascendancy in the former Soviet republics that border on Russia—a 21st-century version of the Great Game.
With American encouragement, the Armenian prime minister has now fully committed to economic and military decoupling from Russia. Given Armenia’s extensive trade, cultural connections, and treaty obligations with its northern neighbor, disentanglement will be no easy, cost-free undertaking. Pashinyan’s announcement of his intention to oversee Armenian’s withdrawal from the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and his public demonstrations of support for Zelensky’s Ukraine, are among the most visible symbols of Armenia’s swift pivot away from Russia. Pashinyan appears to relish poking the Russian bear while it is tied down in Ukraine.
Next on the agenda of the budding strategic partnership is the signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty—a move that would have huge geopolitical implications. The two neighboring countries have fought two horrific wars over the Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armenia won the first (1988-1994). Azerbaijan won the second, in only 44 days, in 2020. The latter testifies to a massive shift of the balance of power in Azerbaijan’s favor, due mainly to its phenomenal energy riches and its status in an emerging Turkic Muslim alliance.
The envisioned treaty would open the borders between Armenia and its historic adversaries, Azerbaijan and Turkey, for the first time in over 35 years. This, O’Brien claims, would create conditions for an epic, Hegelian end of history transformation of Armenia into a prosperous crossroads of peace, after having been for centuries an impoverished and war-torn crossroads of empires.
The revolutionary vision, as O’Brien explains it, includes not only Armenia’s integration into Washington’s Euro-Atlantic network of alliances and partnerships. It also features the merging of Christian Armenia into a vast economic unit dominated by Muslim- and Turkish-majority states—without Russia and China—stretching from Kazakhstan in the East to the Black and Mediterranean Seas in the West. New energy pipelines leading to Europe, and the promotion of both unimpeded trade and the free movement of people—inclusive of freedom of residency—are key components. The political and economic infrastructure already exists in the form of the Organization of Turkic States, of which Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan are members. All that’s left to be done is the neutering of Russia and China.
O’Brien has urged Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s ultranationalist dictator, Ilham Aliyev, to sign a peace treaty without delay, while Russia is still bogged down in Ukraine. But Aliyev keeps coming up with new conditions in response to every concession made by Pashinyan. The latest demand is for Armenia to change its constitution to remove references to the vast swathes of the Armenian homeland lost both in the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 and in Azerbaijan’s wars against Armenians since 1988. The symbolic meaning of these changes would be to convert Armenia from being a state for all Armenians, scattered across the world by the genocide, to a state for the people who happen live within its borders—in effect, to de-nationalize the state.
The defense of Armenia’s endangered Christian and ethnic cultural identity was the raison d’etre of the first short-lived independent Armenian Republic, as it emerged in 1918 from the catastrophic destruction of the Armenian Genocide. The same was true of the current Republic as it came to life out of the ruins of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Pashinyan has already announced his intention to produce an entirely new constitution. This astonishing concession follows hard on the heels of his acceptance of Azerbaijan’s blockade and ethnic cleansing of over 100,000 Armenian Christians in Nagorno Karabakh, his acquiescence to Azerbaijan’s military occupation of 80 square miles of Armenia’s borderland territory, his unilateral and unreciprocated surrender of four disputed villages in the Armenian Apostolic Diocese of Tavush, and his abandonment of dozens of Armenian political hostages languishing in Azerbaijani jails.
Despite repeatedly yielding to Azerbaijan with American encouragement, Armenia has not yet received what it needs most from America: security guarantees. Indeed, the logic of Washington’s policy seems more likely to produce the demise of Armenia than its salvation. Without security guarantees from a major power, there is nothing to stop Azerbaijan—supported by Turkey and the pan-Turkic league—from reducing Armenia to vassalage. Even if Azerbaijan does not resume armed aggression, Armenia’s integration into a pan-Turkic free trade and movement zone will eventually result in its slow death through economic imperialism and colonization.
Armenia, with a population of under three million, is economically depressed. Its GDP, it is often jokingly said, is based merely on apricots and brandy. Energy-rich Azerbaijan, on the other hand, has a population of over ten million, and is positioning itself as a type of new ‘Gulf state’ on the Caspian. The pan-Turkic sea in which Armenia floats has a population of over 170 million.
Aliyev claims that all of Armenia, which he openly calls West Azerbaijan, belongs by historical right to Turkic Muslims and will again be occupied by them. This dream is by no means far-fetched. Comparing an early 19th century ethno-religious map of the broader Middle East with the present reality shows that vast swathes of land once occupied by Armenians and other Christians have now become entirely Islamized. The prospect of a Turkic Muslim-dominated Armenia is entirely in harmony with the ideology that dominates the American foreign policy establishment, in which Christian identity counts for little, and market integration is seen as both a panacea and a lever for American power. An Armenian national state is small beer to players of the new Great Game.
Armenians are greatly rattled by the fresh existential crisis now facing their vulnerable nation. Fear of national annihilation, and a profound lack of confidence in Pashinyan’s ability to avert it, drives the civil society demonstrations that O’Brien pointedly ignored in Yerevan. Considering the nation’s breathtaking shrinkage as the result of the Armenian Genocide, and the aftershocks of ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan, who can blame them? Given the weakness of the fragmented political parties forming the parliamentary opposition, the Armenian Apostolic Church has stepped into the breach. The head of the Church, the Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II, sees it as a sacred duty.
The Armenian Apostolic Church takes pride both in having produced the first Christian nation, in AD 301, and in having withstood severe persecution while fulfilling its role as the only bulwark of the nation following the demise of Armenian statehood. It has a constitutional mandate to preserve the national culture and identity. The Catholicos now sees this threatened by a prime minister beholden to powerful anti-national foreign forces. The Catholicos has therefore authorized the charismatic Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan to accept the leadership of the protest movement. The archbishop first served as the spokesman for members of his diocese opposed to Pashinyan’s surrender of the four disputed villages to Azerbaijan. He then led a band of locals in a march to the capital, with throngs joining him along the way.
Had Galstanyan ridden a donkey, his entry to Yerevan would have looked like a reenactment of Palm Sunday. The archbishop has been so effective in mobilizing the masses that he has been nominated by the parliamentary opposition as its candidate for prime minister. But Good Friday suffering often follows Palm Sunday enthusiasm.
The unseating of an authoritarian government by a popular opposition movement is a rarity, unless the latter has external support. Pashinyan got it from Washington in 2018. Galstanyan does not have it in 2024. Not even the Kremlin, which would stand most to gain by regime change in Yerevan, shows any sign—at least for now—of getting mixed up in risky regime change operations while under pressure in Ukraine. If Pashinyan will not listen to the boisterously put advice of Galstanyan, he would do well to heed the softly spoken, considered opinion of retired, long-serving, U.S. Ambassador Edward Djerejian, a distinguished diplomat of Armenian descent: It is “not in Armenia’s interest to pivot in any serious way toward any one power!”
The Armenian Church and Galstanyan’s political movement can expect nothing more from declining Europe than it does from the United States. Brussels follows Washington’s foreign policy directives more closely than ever, becomes ever more economically dependent on Azerbaijan and the emerging pan-Turkic bloc, and casts off its own Christian identity and values in exchange for global multiculturalism. Every public encounter between Pashinyan and the EU’s van der Leyen–Borrel–Michel triumvirate confirms this grim reality.
