Karabakh emphasises the importance of repairing relations with Russia

Russia’s influence on its neighbours is most often portrayed as lamentable and exploitative. As such it is unsurprising that Dmitry Medvedev’s efforts to broker a settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan have been at best ignored and at worst portrayed as a cynical component of Russia’s attempt to establish energy hegemony over the west. Whilst states will naturally be most motivated by projects which accord with their own interests, Russia is in no way unusual in this regard and its mediating in the Nagorno Karabakh dispute should not be lightly dismissed.

The conflict, like other post Soviet crises, has been bequeathed upon the states by a strategic piece of Stalinist arbitrariness. Karkakh, a region populated mainly by ethnic Armenians, was allocated to Azerbaijan’s administrative area under Stalin’s policy of divide and rule. Now Medvedev has the leaders of both countries signed up to solving their disagreements by negotiation. This is unequivocally a positive development.

In a prevailing climate of Russophobia there is temptation for western politicians to see successful Russian conflict resolution as a threat. Instead it actually emphasises that Russia can be a stabilising bulwark in the region, if the west chooses to treat it as a partner rather than a threat. In his victory speech Barack Obama has spoken of American ‘alliances to repair’ as a task which faces him. If he genuinely does wish to repair alliances then the US’ relationship with Russia might be a useful place to start.

Perhaps he might do well to listen to Congressman Jerold Nadler, who campaigned for Obama last week and answered a question about Iran and Israel in the following terms,

“We have not been willing to put our priorities properly. We have not been willing to say ... "Hey Russia, we won't expand NATO into the Ukraine and Georgia, right next to your borders, if you cooperate with us on Iran." ...I think Iran and Israel are a hell of a lot more important than expanding NATO to Russia's borders. Why should we? What do we need it for?”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more