(MENAFN- Asia Times) Continuing tectonic changes in macro-regional Asian geopolitics have been launched by the combination of Azerbaijan's victory in the Second Karabakh War two years ago and Russia's approaching defeat in its war of aggression in Ukraine. Those changes reach far beyond the South Caucasus and Eastern European geopolitical theaters. They range, indeed, from Southwest Asia (including Iran and Syria) to Central Asia.
To understand these changes and their implications, it is useful to begin by how the Russian war against Ukraine has changed the international dynamics around Syria and Israel. From there, the relation to the South Caucasus region will become clear, and from there, to the Caspian Sea region and Central Asia.
Russia has in recent months moved more directly and forthrightly toward overt military and strategic cooperation with Iran. That is because its losses in the Ukraine theater have obliged it to redeploy its forces away from Syria (as well as the South Caucasus) to Ukraine.
Russia's understanding with Israel had been that the latter had relative liberty to counteract Iranian and Iranian-backed forces in Syria, so long as Israel did not interfere with Russian interests in the broader region.
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Now, however, with the weakening of the Russian military in the Greater Levant region, Israel is more free to counteract Iran's interests in Lebanon and no longer needs Russia's“permission” to defend its strategic interests in the Greater Levant.
Because Iran cannot act against Israel so easily in Lebanon, it has increased pressure against Israel's interests in the South Caucasus, in particular against Azerbaijan, which is its close economic and military partner.
At the same time, Iran's threats against Azerbaijan have increased after the recent Israeli-Turkish rapprochement, which Azerbaijan an important role in promoting. Azerbaijan, in return, , after 30 years of diplomatic relations with Israel, to open an embassy there.
Tehran is opposed to the opening of the , to which Yerevan committed itself in the November 2020 Trilateral Statement with Baku and Moscow that ended the Second Karabakh War, and which would link Azerbaijan's exclave Nakhchivan with the body of Azerbaijan proper.
Indeed, Iran recently military exercises crossing the Aras River, at a point where it is entirely in its own territory, but which nominally marks in most places its border with Azerbaijan. This was a clear military provocation against Baku.
Russia, by contrast, now favors the Zangezur corridor, because it would help it to establish communications and overland links with Armenia through Azerbaijan, and also with Georgia through Azerbaijan; but Russia will not pressure Armenia on the issue. Such infrastructure as survives from the Soviet period has not been much upgraded, and links are more efficient through Azerbaijani territory.
The Zangezur corridor would greatly facilitate and enhance Turkey's connectivity into Central Asia. That is another reason for Iran's opposition to the corridor.
Of course there are also deep historical origins to Tehran's general hostility against Ankara, as well as present-day geopolitical rationales; but this corridor is also in European and American interests. The Zangezur corridor could become part of an energy corridor for new exports to the West from Central Asia across the Caspian Sea.
Armenia was invited in the 1990s to host the oil pipeline from Azerbaijan's offshore Azeri-Chirag-Deepwater Guneshli deposit (ACG, called the“contract of the century” at the time), but it refused. That is why the export pipeline was built through Georgia: the now-famous Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline.
Such recalcitrance led Armenia also to reject Turkish invitations to all-Caucasus economic cooperation in the late 2000s. This is why Armenia remains mired in poverty and strategic dependence on Russia, and now increasingly on Iran.
Today the implementation of the Zangezur corridor accords with the development of the Trans-Caspian International Trade Route (TITR), also called the“Middle Corridor.” The Middle Corridor's multi-modal port system larger amounts of oil, wheat, and other commodities to transit to European markets from Central Asia (and China), and they will do so more efficiently and less expensively.
Helping Kazakhstan to overcome Russian obstacles to exporting its oil would enhance the European Union's energy security. The EU recently an agreement with Kazakhstan for the production of hydrogen there, to be transited to Europe through as yet undefined pipelines.
Presumably, these would have to include a pipeline along the Caspian seabed to Azerbaijan, which has with the EU to export to Europe electricity generated from renewable sources, through Georgia and under the Black Sea to Romania.
Fifteen years ago there were plans on the drawing boards to construct such an undersea pipeline from Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan for natural gas. The EU would on a“dual-purpose” pipeline for natural gas and hydrogen.
In a perhaps related development, the US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu, has just visited Turkmenistan and publicly re-inaugurated American for the construction of the Trans-Caspian Gas Pipeline (TCGP).
It has been that the the EU's Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia (TRACECA) program – which has provided technical, logistical, and practical assistance to the region for three decades – might take up responsibilities once tasked to the former program called Interstate Oil and Gas Transportation to Europe (INOGATE), before the latter's Technical Secretariat ceased functioning in 2016.
It remains in the EU's interest to assist Kazakhstan's efforts to construct alternative transit corridors, circumventing Russia, across the Caspian Sea and through Azerbaijan. That means, among other things, support for the Zangezur corridor.