Artsakh-Azerbaijani War

[Tigranes]

Really annoyed with Turkish president but not ordinary Turkish people. Some of them have this to say about Turkey supported full scale war in Nagorno Karabakh/Artsakh :

I'm from Turkey and I heard Azerbaijani agression on Armenia with support of two of the ME terror supporter country, Turkey and Israel.

All media channels from TV to (even opposition) web sites make propoganda against Armenia. What I see is two democratic dictator are trying to increase their population in their countries. I'm sorry for your losses. Azerbaijanis are trying to make Turkey declare war or Armenia and occupy Armenia for themselves. Turkey shouldn't support warmonger Azerbaijan.

For those of you who are keeping score of Turkish military shenanigans the list is growing longer by each month lately: Kurds in Syria, Aegean Sea, Libia, Eastern Mediterranean and now all-in offensive by Azerbaijan right after joint millitary exercise. Looks like some Turkish F-16s delayed returning home after war games.
If in early 20th century Turkey was labled sick man of Europe then in early 21st century it can rightfully be called sick man of NATO.

 

[Lexicus]

More like "the embodiment of the moral corruption of NATO" tbh

 

[Arwon]

Can't wait to see everyone's instant takes on this one tbh

 

[Phrossack]

NATO should have had a mechanism for kicking out members, but realistically, that wouldn't stop Turkey and no country or alliance can make the Turks change their policies of aggression.

As for Azerbaijan, it looks like popular support for war there is high enough that they'll keep fighting for some time, and they spend more on their military than Armenia spends, period. This is going to be ugly - if they take Artsakh, they'll be brutal to the Armenian population there. I hope international mediation can stop it, but let's be real, this is 2020 and hope is a delusion. This will probably end in mass death.

 

[innonimatu]

I guess this leaves Iran and Georgia as the only neighbors of Turkey they are not actively at war with or threatening war.

NATO should have had a mechanism for kicking out members, but realistically, that wouldn't stop Turkey and no country or alliance can make the Turks change their policies of aggression.

Indirectly it would. Navies are no longer the apex of military power but those straits probably are still attractive to the russians - it goes back centuries. If they were sure NATO would not intervene at all on Turkey's side a coalition to stop Turkey would be possible - and better, its mere possibility would be enough to stop their warmongering. But with Turkey protected there won't be one. The wars will be around Turkey, its territory off limits for retaliation. Unless they manage to get into a war with the israelis, those have better protection! But Erdogan would have to swallow Syria and Lebanon before expanding the empire there. His goals do not seem that far-fetched.

On the plus side, Syria gets rid of some of the pet turk jihadis, redeploying to kill armenians.

 

[Kyriakos]

NATO should have had a mechanism for kicking out members, but realistically, that wouldn't stop Turkey and no country or alliance can make the Turks change their policies of aggression.

This isn't realistic. Turkey would collapse economically in an instant, if Eu or US place serious sanctions.
Keep in mind that 20 million kurds live there, and want to have their own country. It's an inherently unstable entity.

Isn't Armenia supposed to be protected by Russia? I think Russia will do well to stop pretending to be pro-Turkey, alienating historic ties to countries it shares culture with.

 

[Ajidica]

Is anyone in this conflict even close to being "the good guys", or should I decide who I should support based on the quality of their national food?

 

[Kyriakos]

Is anyone in this conflict even close to being "the good guys", or should I decide who I should support based on the quality of their national food?

Are you trying to just troll? I want to be of the view you aren't that out of touch with reality.

Or you might just like third-world dictatorships like Azer, or Turkey for that matter.

 

[amadeus]

Can't wait to see everyone's instant takes on this one tbh

I’ll admit my sympathies lie with the Armenians; it seems like they’re surrounded by hostile countries. What can they do?

I just think back to the 1988-89 conflict; Gorbachev being in the unenviable position at the helm of a multiethnic empire that was facing economic collapse. Dispatching the Red Army to restore order? A band-aid measure. Not to mention the earthquake which didn’t make things any better.

Have either the U.S. or European powers a consistent policy on Central Asia? Yugoslavia, in NATO’s backyard, seemed to have an easy policy answer: turn everyone against Serbia. As bad as Milosevic was, I think the NATO powers just ended up alienating an already unstable Russia that had mixed feelings towards its Western counterparts. Compounded too with Russia taking the lion’s share of Soviet debts.

Maybe the smart policy would have been one of enacting a kind of post-Soviet Marshall Plan, helping to stabilize the post-Soviet countries (on conditions of respecting human rights and at least semi-liberal governments.) International creditors would need to “take a haircut,” but leaving those countries to wither on the vine as their Potemkin economies nosedived? What good came from that? Then add in the eastward expansion of NATO, but excluding Russia from the alliance. I’m not an expert on Russian psychology, but superficially hasn’t their foreign policy for the last 400 years been to build a buffer zone around their country? Germany invaded them twice in a generation, as had Poland, and the intervention on the White side in 1918-19.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I see the long-term prospects of stability in the region to become even further remote as East-West tensions rise, now including a hyperaggressive Red China that will court Russia and give them what they want.

 

[Ajidica]

Are you trying to just troll? I want to be of the view you aren't that out of touch with reality.

Not trying to troll, but everything I can remember about the conflict is two parties fighting over some barren mountains because both of their great great grandparents used to live there.
Oh, and prompting some outstanding nationalist manhood-measuring contests over on the Total War forums.

 

[Kyriakos]

Not trying to troll, but everything I can remember about the conflict is two parties fighting over some barren mountains because both of their great great grandparents used to live there.
Oh, and prompting some outstanding nationalist manhood-measuring contests over on the Total War forums.

Just keep away from the TWC. The politics subforum is the worst.
Azer is a dictatorship where opposition members end up dead. The same in Turkey. Not a good sign if you support those.

Inno summed up the tell-tale sign anyway:

I guess this leaves Iran and Georgia as the only neighbors of Turkey they are not actively at war with or threatening war.

 

[Estebonrober]

I’ll admit my sympathies lie with the Armenians; it seems like they’re surrounded by hostile countries. What can they do?

I just think back to the 1988-89 conflict; Gorbachev being in the unenviable position at the helm of a multiethnic empire that was facing economic collapse. Dispatching the Red Army to restore order? A band-aid measure. Not to mention the earthquake which didn’t make things any better.

Have either the U.S. or European powers a consistent policy on Central Asia? Yugoslavia, in NATO’s backyard, seemed to have an easy policy answer: turn everyone against Serbia. As bad as Milosevic was, I think the NATO powers just ended up alienating an already unstable Russia that had mixed feelings towards its Western counterparts. Compounded too with Russia taking the lion’s share of Soviet debts.

Maybe the smart policy would have been one of enacting a kind of post-Soviet Marshall Plan, helping to stabilize the post-Soviet countries (on conditions of respecting human rights and at least semi-liberal governments.) International creditors would need to “take a haircut,” but leaving those countries to wither on the vine as their Potemkin economies nosedived? What good came from that? Then add in the eastward expansion of NATO, but excluding Russia from the alliance. I’m not an expert on Russian psychology, but superficially hasn’t their foreign policy for the last 400 years been to build a buffer zone around their country? Germany invaded them twice in a generation, as had Poland, and the intervention on the White side in 1918-19.

I guess what I’m getting at is that I see the long-term prospects of stability in the region to become even further remote as East-West tensions rise, now including a hyperaggressive Red China that will court Russia and give them what they want.

There was a great article I read about an American diplomat who Clinton drove crazy by letting the American Cold Warriors continue fighting against Russia instead of bringing them into the fold. We have suffered desperately from that decision. There was a brief moment wherein Russia might have joined NATO. It would have taken better leaders then the US has anymore though. . .Our lack of vision is the keenest sign of our decline.

 

[Ajidica]

Our lack of vision is the keenest sign of our decline.

Wait, we had foreign policy vision? Was that back when we were trying to overthrow or assassinate anyone who smelled vaguely of Communism, or when we were sending arms to all sorts of "freedom fighters"?

 

[Estebonrober]

Wait, we had foreign policy vision? Was that back when we were trying to overthrow or assassinate anyone who smelled vaguely of Communism, or when we were sending arms to all sorts of "freedom fighters"?

Marshall Plan, I mean agree or not making enemies into allies is how truly great things are accomplished. Whether I like how it was done the post war dream had a good ride for hundreds of millions of humans.

 

[Ajidica]

Marshall Plan, I mean agree or not making enemies into allies is how truly great things are accomplished. Whether I like how it was done the post war dream had a good ride for hundreds of millions of humans.

We were also plunging the world into an arms escalation that could destroy the planet, rigging foreign elections (Italy, 1948), overthrowing foreign governments largely at the behest of US commercial interests (Guatemala, 1954), and if we push the dates a bit, supporting the assassination of a democratically elected Prime Minister (Lumumba, 1961).
I will say our foreign policy during the late 40s and 50s was nominally better than later in the Cold War as we were positioning ourselves as anti-Imperialist and trying to break up the European colonial empires.
EDIT: But this is getting OT.

 

[Phrossack]

This isn't realistic. Turkey would collapse economically in an instant, if Eu or US place serious sanctions.
Keep in mind that 20 million kurds live there, and want to have their own country. It's an inherently unstable entity.

Isn't Armenia supposed to be protected by Russia? I think Russia will do well to stop pretending to be pro-Turkey, alienating historic ties to countries it shares culture with.

The EU and NATO have a lot to lose by angering Turkey too much. Erdogan uses the threat of pushing huge numbers of Syrian refugees out of Turkey and into Europe as leverage, and NATO would lose a lot if Turkey went fully into Russia's orbit - sure, Turkey and Russia have a lot of disputes, but a Russo-Turkish alliance would be a serious threat.

Is anyone in this conflict even close to being "the good guys", or should I decide who I should support based on the quality of their national food?

So far as I can tell, Artsakh was Armenian for thousands of years, but it got complicated in the last few hundred. Artsakh was mostly Armenian in the USSR but part of the Azerbaijan SSR, and so the first war decided who would control it. Artsakh has been unofficially independent since then, and is very strongly associated with Armenia. The Armenians there hold it, and consider it an ancient homeland. The Azeris see it as lost territory and had many of their people expelled during the war, and demand it back. The Armenians are angry with Turkey for killing so many of their people a century ago that a new word had to be coined for it; Turkey is angry at Armenia for being angry about it, and supports Azerbaijan.

Regardless, the facts now are that a lot of Armenians and Azeris were expelled from their homes during the first war...and that if Azerbaijan loses, it will be embarrassed, while if Artsakh and Armenia lose, there will likely be ethnic cleansing. The Armenians have just a fraction of the people and land they had before the Armenian Genocide and are now surrounded on their little sliver by enemies. It's not a good situation for them.

 

[Kyriakos]

The EU and NATO have a lot to lose by angering Turkey too much. Erdogan uses the threat of pushing huge numbers of Syrian refugees out of Turkey and into Europe as leverage, and NATO would lose a lot if Turkey went fully into Russia's orbit - sure, Turkey and Russia have a lot of disputes, but a Russo-Turkish alliance would be a serious threat.

Virtually no one entered through the land borders, despite Turkey trying to use those immigrants or refugees as a card, after siphoning the vast majority of them from central Asia (Pakistan and Afganistan aren't in Syria). In the sea it is different, but again an actual Eu project would stop it instantly (as would real sanctions). The issue isn't the Eu as a whole, which is also why most Eu countries are in favor of serious sanctions against Turkey. The issue is those few countries that have special trade relations with Turkey and/or turkish population. The one which has both is Germany, which is currently the president of the Eu and has of course installed a puppet, ex, and failed/corrupt german minister, as head of the Eu parliament, with no vote -- the previous president was voted upon by the Eu parliament.

 

[r16]

yeah , proof that Azeris are grinding through the minefields and using New Turkey and like more pertinently lsraeli drones and what not to hunt the Armenian anti tank missile teams . Yeah , Azeris had trouble with New Turkey but have been consistently good with Tel Aviv ... They are preparing to evacuate people and Putin will not be able to weather it to see massacres and what not and also as a reference for history we must like also remember that this war thing only happens after Armenians created firefights in the Tovuz region or what , where the Azeri territory touches Georgia , creating pipeline connections to the West , meaning future competition to Russia's hold on EU . Like coming from Turkmenistan and beyond , in addition to regular Azeri sources , instead of heroic and democratic Qatar , this gas should be passable to you will right away guess who ! Just avoid anyone costs money for the night , am getting old , will create some scandal !

translated as come on , let's bomb 'em all from the orbit .

also having permitted the war , Putin should also end it .

 

[Camikaze]

I was scheduled to visit Azerbaijan this week and Armenia in a fortnight. Thanks Covid I guess?

My hot take is that it's a shame the Armenian PM has proven more nationalistic than reformist. There was a good interview with him on BBC's Hardtalk a few months ago and it was somewhat painfully clear the direction things were heading.

 

[Kyriakos]

I was scheduled to visit Azerbaijan this week and Armenia in a fortnight. Thanks Covid I guess?

My hot take is that it's a shame the Armenian PM has proven more nationalistic than reformist. There was a good interview with him on BBC's Hardtalk a few months ago and it was somewhat painfully clear the direction things were heading.

Armenia is a known warmonger and genocider, just remember your failure to do anything against them despite being supported by 100 massive allied ships.
It's all good, your dead are now buried in a friendly warmonger country.