Cory Welt: The United States should call for Yerevan to pursue a withdrawal from Azerbaijani territories

"The Obama administration’s greatest mistake in promoting Turkish-Armenian rapprochement was in not pushing the AKP to be more explicit about whether or not it was really ready to ratify the protocols without seeing progress on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict" said Dr. Cory Welt, Associate Director of Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University in Washington DC.

According to him, if Washington had pushed the AKP, the US might have understood that tackling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was still a precursor to regional stability, not a potential byproduct of it.

Welt believes that, the United States should clearly reconsider its approach to Armenia and join Turkey in calling for Yerevan to pursue a partial withdrawal from Azerbaijani territories in parallel with normalization with Turkey.

"At this point, however, it is extremely unlikely that it will be successful in the short-term, since the Armenian government was encouraged to stake its foreign policy reputation on achieving rapprochement with Turkey with no preconditions".

In the meantime, he mentioned that, the United States should turn to repairing its damaged relationship with Azerbaijan while encouraging Turkey and Armenia to find less dramatic and more incremental ways to move forward on normalization.


/APA/