Armenia’s geopolitical pivot: EU, US, Turkey, and China challenge Russia’s Caucasus dominance amid shifting alliances
Original framing: “Armenia summits show Europe’s Caucasus rivalry with Trump and Putin” — The Japan Times
The Caucasus has been a crossroads of empires for millennia, with Armenia’s current dilemma echoing its role between Persia, Byzantium, and the Ottomans. The 1921 Treaty of Moscow formalized Soviet control over Nagorno-Karabakh, a wound that resurfaced in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. The 1991 dissolution of the USSR created a power vacuum that external actors now exploit, repeating patterns from the 19th-century Great Game.
Armenia’s geopolitical pivot is not merely a proxy for U.S.
-Russia rivalry but a symptom of deeper structural fractures: the collapse of the Soviet security architecture, the weaponization of energy and diaspora networks, and the resurgence of imperial nostalgia in Ankara and Moscow. The country’s predicament mirrors historical precedents like Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war, where external patrons fueled internal divisions, or Cyprus’s frozen conflict, where NATO and non-NATO actors collide. Indigenous frameworks like *hayrenik* and diaspora capital offer pathways to resilience, but only if paired with structural reforms—such as EU accession with sovereignty safeguards or China-led debt-for-peace swaps—that break the cycle of dependency. The trickster’s insight reveals the absurdity of treating Armenia as a pawn: its very survival depends on playing multiple games at once, exposing the limitations of binary geopolitical frames. The solution lies not in choosing between empires but in building institutions—whether digital, economic, or diplomatic—that transcend them, with Armenia as the unlikely architect of a multipolar Caucasus.