Accessing the Rising Wealth of Central Asia

Commentary

Western access to the landlocked markets of Central Asia, and the Central Asian states’ access to world markets, may be a major key to the next economic boom and strategic transformation. But how does this happen, and how can the region create a real separation from Russia and the People’s Republic of China in the coming few years?

The strategic mold has now been broken in Central Asia, potentially relieving the region of its landlocked status and making it a vibrant economic zone between Russia and China. The imminent resolution of the Armenia–Azerbaijan war may allow this flowering to occur.

Many factors have been operating in very recent years to effectuate the normalization of relations between Azerbaijan and Armenia, but none more so than recent steps by Azerbaijan to push aside the counterproductive Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and its Minsk Group, which had been originally designed in 1992 to end bilateral hostilities between the two Caucasus states.

OSCE had been unable to broker a meaningful peace process, and along with its Minsk Group, the OSCE has become one of the 20th-century treaty bodies likely to disappear shortly. As with the United Nations, it only succeeded in embedding in concrete the frozen conflicts under its care, rather than achieving durable outcomes. In the case of the seemingly intractable Azerbaijan–Armenia conflict ongoing since 1990–1991, meaningful progress occurred only after military conflict revived to provide a decisive result on the ground in 2023, leaving Azerbaijan once again in control of territories seized by Armenia when the USSR collapsed in 1990–1991.

Talks held in Abu Dhabi on July 10 between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, accompanied by high-level ministerial teams, set the stage for a comprehensive settlement of the longstanding territorial disputes between them. This could well result in a significant cooperative economic arrangement between the two states that would restore Armenia as a major transit territory for Caspian region oil and gas to Europe, and result in a major trade route to, and partnership with, the Central Asian region.

Significantly, the process has the strong endorsement of Turkey as well as Israel, and seems set to win approval in Moscow and possibly Tehran, when the Iranian crisis settles (with or without a clerical leadership there). Reporting in the United States has attempted to portray the progress in the Armenia–Azerbaijan situation as a success for the Trump administration, but the only meaningful role Washington has had may have been the decision to pull the United States out of the OSCE Minsk Process intervention in the dispute. And even that may have been by default.

There was, too, an inevitability in the dispute reaching this stage of negotiation. It lay in the growth of Azerbaijan’s economy and its rising importance as an oil and gas producer, which in turn has allowed it to build its post-independence (i.e., post-Soviet) defense capabilities. (Azerbaijan’s GDP grew from $444 million in 1992 to $74.32 billion in 2024.)

Armenia had, with tacit backing from the post-Soviet military, conducted a massive geographical expansion into Azerbaijani territory at a time when Azerbaijan was impoverished and militarily weak. (Armenia’s GDP in 1992 was $1.72 billion and in 2024 was $25.79 billion.) Azerbaijan’s rebirth, economically and militarily, seemed to occur without the Armenian leaders even noticing, and when the Armenian forces in occupied Azerbaijani territory reopened hostilities against Azerbaijan in 2023, the retaliation was swift and decisive.

Russia, which needed Azerbaijan for linkage to Iran, helped stabilize the situation by urging Armenia to negotiate. It has taken two years for emotions to settle sufficiently for the talks to become meaningful.

And they have. The first tangible signs must, however, be converted into legal steps, such as removing from Armenia’s constitution claims over Azerbaijani territory (including the Nagorno–Karabakh Armenian-speaking exclave), and the affirmation of a trade corridor from metropolitan Azerbaijan to the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, via the proposed Zangezur corridor.

The ethnic, religious, and linguistic/cultural barriers between the Turkic-speaking (but culturally Persian) Azeris in Azerbaijan and the Armenians have been polarizing for at least two millennia but have mostly allowed for intercommunal cooperation and harmony. It is not the over-simplified Christian-versus-Muslim dispute that has been portrayed in Western media, especially given the extensive multi-confessional nature of Azerbaijani society.

The Armenia–Azerbaijan dispute effectively ended the Cold War and post-Cold War era of “freezing conflicts” rather than resolving them decisively through the efforts of the opposing parties.

This is part of the post-post-Cold War world of substantive change, and it holds great promise for economic revival for many in the world.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.