Europe watches from sidelines as Baku, Yerevan rewrite rules of peace |
Armenia’s recent reciprocal delegation visit to Azerbaijan, coming on the heels of the Azerbaijani delegation’s trip to Yerevan, shows a reality and a turning point that would have seemed unthinkable even a year ago. For decades, relations between the two neighbours appeared frozen stiff, locked in a cycle of hostility that many believed would never thaw. Yet, against all odds, the ice has finally begun to melt. The fact that this breakthrough emerged not from grand international summits, but from direct bilateral engagement, speaks volumes about the new realities of the South Caucasus.
For years, peace initiatives were lost in a maze of multilateral formats, such as trilateral, quadrilateral, and everything in between. Meeting after meeting ended in stalemate. Now, with hindsight, it is clear that these efforts fell flat because they were approached through the wrong lens. External actors, especially Western institutions and European structures, viewed the region through their own interests, agendas, and geopolitical calculations. They acted as though the South Caucasus were a chessboard on which they could advance their own positions. Meanwhile, genuine peace remained out of reach.
The failure of these formats was no mystery, but only a myth sustained by diplomatic inertia. Armenia and Azerbaijan were treated less as sovereign actors capable of resolving their own differences and more as pawns in someone else’s geopolitical game. The result was predictable: much ado about nothing.
This dynamic became especially clear around 2020, when international pressure on Azerbaijan began to mount. At the very moment when a country suffering thirty years of occupation sought to restore its territorial integrity, a chorus of criticism, manipulation, and misinformation arose from media outlets, political platforms, and even international organisations. What became visible was the stark contrast between declared........