(MENAFN- Trend News Agency) 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 Turkey and Azerbaijan establish a trans-Caspian trade route via
the Zangezur corridor,' he concluded.