BAKU, Azerbaijan, November 15. Following Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in the Second Karabakh War in late 2020, Iran has doubled down on its long-standing diplomatic provocations, economic warfare, and threats of military aggression against Azerbaijan. The qualitative increase in its support for Armenia against Azerbaijan manifests in each of these areas.
This is stated in an article of Robert M. Cutler, a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, published in Geopolitical Monitor agency.
Cutler noted that on the diplomatic front, in October, Iran opened a consulate in Kapan, the capital of Armenia’s Syunik province, where the Zangezur corridor should be built (and coincidentally only a few miles from the border with Azerbaijan).
"Armenia committed to construct the Zangezur corridor, between the body of Azerbaijan and its exclave Nakhchivan, in the November 2020 trilateral statement with Azerbaijan and Russia, that put an end to the Second Karabakh War. Iran and Armenia pretend that the corridor would be extraterritorial and an infringement on state sovereignty; however, the Lachin corridor inside Azerbaijan, with which it is frequently compared by analogy, is neither of those. Nor does it matter that Russian border guards would provide security, because they provide security for nearly all of Armenia’s borders with Azerbaijan as it is," Cutler said.
On the economic front, he noted, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has been intensifying its military-industrial cooperation with Armenian economic leaders in technological and surveillance fields.
"Executives of Iranian military companies have been visiting Armenia since the beginning of the year. When an Iranian Export and Investment Centre was established in Yerevan earlier this year, Iranian laser- and communications-system and drone manufacturers were well-represented. The deputy governor of the Syunik region has met with the Chinese ambassador to Yerevan, welcoming Chinese foreign direct investment in the region, not excluding the military-industrial sector," Cutler added.
On the military front, he wrote, even in late 2020 during the Second Karabakh War, Iranian forces actually entered occupied Azerbaijani territory near the historic Khudafarin bridge.
"This aided Yerevan’s aggression against Baku by blocking the latter’s road to Zengilan. In September 2021, Iran held extraordinary war games near its border with Azerbaijan. Again, in October of this year, Iran conducted large military exercises on its border with Azerbaijan, including practising crossing the Aras River, which defines a large part of the border between the two states. On November 2, the Ministry of Defence in Baku reported that still more, unannounced military drills had begun near the border," he recalled.
Cutler noted that Iran has consistently sought to sow havoc in Baku and overturn the secular government there.
"So it is nothing new that—in addition to the diplomatic, economic and military provocations by Iran against Azerbaijan mentioned above—simple outright attempts to subvert and overthrow the government also continue. Just this month, Baku detained an illegally-armed group of Azerbaijani citizens trained and funded by Iran’s intelligence services. They had been indoctrinated against the Baku government under the guise of "radical-extremist religious ideas", viz., the theocratic Twelver doctrine, of which Iran is the only state exponent in the world. Not long afterward, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service exposed an Iranian spy network in Baku and undertook measures to suppress its subversive intelligence activity," Cutler wrote.
From all the preceding, he said, it would seem that there is no "short-term fix" for the tensions that Iran is provoking in the region.
"The manipulation of Western elites is part and parcel of this strategy. Armenia is lockstep in this, mobilizing its diaspora—particularly in France and the US—so as to vitiate the West’s action in defence of its own objective interests: not just concerning Armenia’s conflict with Azerbaijan, but moreover Western policy toward Iran in general," Cutler said.
He said Armenia is and has been for the last 30 years, since independence, an ally of Iran.
"Their joint co-operation is taking on a still more intense
dynamic since the end of the Second Karabakh War. The situation is
complicated further by the international dimensions of the
disastrous economic and political abyss into which the Tehran
regime has been leading Iran for years. This abyss is being further
excavated by the IRGC’s having taken, a few years ago, full control
of the country away from the theocratic elite who originally
created it," Cutler said
Barring regime change, Cutler noted, it seems unlikely that Iran
alters its aggressive policies in the foreseeable future.
"This would seem to be so, not only because its own elite is so invested in these policies, but also because they do not wish to see Türkiye and Azerbaijan establish a trans-Caspian trade route via the Zangezur corridor," he concluded.