WAR has returned to the Caucasus with renewed fighting between the two former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Like the war between Russia and Ukraine, this conflict points to the volatility of the new era of great power rivalry.
The terrible wars that engulfed formerly socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s divided the citizens of a secular multinational country into Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks; Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims.
In the Caucasus the break-up of the Soviet Union precipitated a similarly bloody conflict between Muslim-majority Azerbaijan and Orthodox Christian Armenia. An uneasy truce lasted from 1994 to 2020 when a six-week war saw Azerbaijan reclaim large swathes of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
Mutual dissatisfaction with the Russia-brokered ceasefire that ended that conflict has now ignited it again.
Why war after decades of truce? The reality is that regional powers are responding to the decline of US global hegemony by pursuing their own ambitions.
The collapse of the Soviet Union created nation states from what had previously been internal borders.
In some areas large numbers of Russians ended up on non-Russian territory — a factor in the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and an ongoing source of tension and resentment in Latvia and Estonia.
This specifically national question is what led Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2005 to describe the break-up of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century,” rather than any regret for the end of socialism, which he has repeatedly praised.
While the forcible overthrow of a Russia-leaning government in Ukraine in 2014 and the steady incorporation of Ukraine into US-led military formations undoubtedly paved the road to this year’s Russian invasion, Putin’s rhetoric around “an anti-Russia on our historic lands,” his claim that Lenin invented Ukraine and the attempts to incorporate territories well beyond the Donbass into Russia through referendums all indicate a desire on his government’s part to redraw the borders of 1991.
In the Caucasus the great power attempting to upset the apple cart is not Russia, which is trying now as it did in 2020 to broker a ceasefire, but Turkey, which sponsored and armed the Azerbaijani assault of 2020 — which, like the conflict of the 1990s, quickly took on characteristics of ethnic cleansing including the destruction of Armenian churches and erasure of medieval inscriptions.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s expansionism has been clear in repeated armed incursions into Iraq and Syria, bloodthirsty threats levelled regularly against Greece and in a more shadowy network of diplomacy, bribery and funding of armed groups that challenges Russian and Chinese influence in central Asia, including through backing Uighur separatism in Xinjiang.
Turkey, though a Nato member, is not following US orders — though in some cases their interests coincide, in others, such as the Syrian conflict, Turkey attacked Kurdish forces aligned with the United States. It is using the decline of US power to carve out a bigger regional role for itself.
The left’s attitude to this cannot be, like that of liberal pundits, to lament US decline.
Like the British empire before it, the blood has never dried on a world dominated by the United States, and its “unipolar moment” saw the launch of the “forever wars” that have spread death and destruction across the Middle East.
But the emergence of rival powers, each seeking to exploit “frozen conflicts” for their own advantage, makes the likelihood of direct war between great powers more likely — and with it the risk of World War III.
National and ethnic divides are hardening at a time when climate change threatens increasing scarcity of resources. This is a recipe for war without end.
It is paramount that the left across borders unites in the struggle for peace and co-operation, not victory for one or other side in an endless succession of potential disputes.
