Commentary
Thomas de Waal
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Source: Getty
Commentary
Mr. Warlick’s Tough New Job
The appointment of a new mediator for the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict lasting for 25 years now, is a good moment to ask whether Washington could be undertaking more to resolve the dispute.
Published on Sep 11, 2013
You will definitely not read about this in The New York Times: The new appointee to be the co-chair of the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mediating the Nagorny Karabakh conflict is taking up his job. He is James Warlick, a diplomat with a good resumé from the world’s trouble-spots, who was most recently U.S. ambassador in Bulgaria.
By my calculation, Warlick is the ninth American diplomat to do the job of co-chair in an official capacity since 1997 when the United States became one of the three co-chairs mediating the conflict, along with France and Russia. The appointment of a new mediator for the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict lasting for 25 years now, is a good moment to ask whether Washington could be undertaking more to resolve the dispute.
Mostly, the answer is a depressing “no.”
The main reason why the Karabakh conflict is intractable is the same as it has been since it broke out in 1988—incompatible demands, unrealistic expectations, and leaders unwilling or unprepared to make a deal.
I have compared mediation efforts to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, with the mediators more than once rolling a rock to the top of a hill, only each time to see it come sliding down again.
Periodically there are calls (including from one recent contributor to this blog) for Washington to appoint a big foreign-policy heavyweight to do the Karabakh job, to give the stone a heavier push.
This is no longer sufficient—if it ever was. The list of heavyweights who have tried to put their diplomatic shoulders to the rock is impressive. It includes Jacques Chirac in 2000, George W. Bush and Colin Powell in 2001, Chirac again in 2006, and Dmitry Medvedev and Sergey Lavrov between 2009 and 2011 (supported by Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy). Obama reportedly told a White House adviser “There are some things I never thought I’d have to know about before I became president—like Nagorny Karabakh.”
This model of high quality diplomacy seems to have exhausted itself. A modest three-page document known as “the Basic Principles” has been in the safe of the secretary general of the OSCE since the end of 2007 and no agreement has been reached on its multiple drafts.
Ideally, Mr. Warlick would arrive in Baku and Yerevan with lots of new carrots and sticks in his pocket to persuade the warring parties to make a deal. In the absence of that, he could try something new—a much more active effort to talk to societies and boost those small constituencies, both Armenian and Azerbaijani, which support peace more strongly than their governments do.
About the Author
Thomas de Waal
Senior Fellow, Carnegie Europe
De Waal is a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, specializing in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.
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Recent Work
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