By Andranik Aboyan
James O’Brien, veteran of the State Department and now commentator for Europe’s liberal think tanks, recognizes the obvious: the Washington accords signed between Armenia and Azerbaijan do not settle the conflict but merely postpone it. He names what is clear to anyone unblinded by ceremony — that Azerbaijan departs triumphant, Armenia receives no dividend, and what passes for “peace” is in truth the management of its deferral.
Yet O’Brien stops where empire begins. He describes the imbalance of concessions but not the structure that produces them. For what is called “peace” here is not the end of violence but its bureaucratization, the translation of force into corridors, pipelines, and memoranda. Armenia is not secured but administered; Azerbaijan is not restrained but integrated into a larger circuitry of value.
Let us not pretend that Washington seeks reconciliation. Realpolitik, when stripped of its polite euphemism, is a politics of use. The South Caucasus is not a terrain of nations striving for coexistence in the American imagination; it is an intersection of objectives: the attrition of Russian influence, the securing of Azerbaijani hydrocarbons, and the stabilization of investments made by Western firms in Caspian oil and gas.
The Biden administration’s energy “diversification” after 2022 was not the creation of a new morality but the re-routing of necessity: once Russian gas was to be reduced, Azerbaijan became indispensable. The current treaty is only the juridical expression of this material fact. The corridor through Syunik is therefore not an answer to Armenian insecurity but a channel for the movement of capital and the projection of influence.
What is the Armenian “peace dividend”? According to O’Brien, nothing: no open border with Turkey, no great investments, only a corridor connecting parts of Azerbaijan. This nothing is not accidental but essential. The dividend does not accrue to Armenia because Armenia is not the subject of this peace but its object. Its role is to host the corridor, to absorb the political backlash, to amend its constitution, to become the site where larger forces demonstrate their reach. The dividend accrues elsewhere: in European capitals eager for gas, in Washington boardrooms that interpret new energy flows as geopolitical profit.
Empire always stages its violence as ceremony. The White House handshake is the inversion of the refugee column from Artsakh; the memorandum of understanding is the continuation of coercion by legal means. One cannot separate them. The dialectic of this “peace” is that it produces its opposite: instability postponed is instability managed, not removed. The corridor system, by aligning Armenia more closely with Washington and by alienating Tehran and Moscow, multiplies rather than resolves the antagonisms in which Armenia is entangled.
It is tempting to view this treaty as Trump’s spectacle, a Republican flourish. But the material conditions were prepared under the Democrats: the strategic emphasis on energy diversification, the silence during Azerbaijan’s incremental coercions, the willingness to treat Armenia as a lever against Russia rather than a partner in its own right. Republicans provide the theater, Democrats the scaffolding; both parties share the substance. The continuity is empire, not partisanship.
O’Brien is correct in his caution but wrong in his frame. He treats the deal as if it were a miscalculation, a matter of leverage poorly spent. The truth is starker: Washington does not miscalculate when it ensures that Armenia bears costs while Azerbaijan, and by extension Western energy interests, reap benefits. That is the calculation. To imagine otherwise is to credit empire with benevolence it has never claimed.
The Washington accords are not the end of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict; they are its transformation into a managed conflict, one that remains perpetually useful to outside powers. For the United States, instability is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be administered, provided that pipelines flow and Russia is weakened. For Azerbaijan, victory is sweetened by Western capital. For Armenia, there is only the role of intermediary terrain — a geography upon which others act.
This is the essence of empire in our time: to transform tragedy into administration, to call extraction stability, and to declare as “peace” what is merely the perpetuation of conflict in forms convenient to power.
