Armenia, the West, and the Cost of ‘Normalization’
BY KHATCHIG TAZIAN
No Armenian disputes the catastrophic damage inflicted on our nation by the Ottoman Empire and later under Tsarist and Soviet rule. Genocide, dispossession, and repression are not rhetorical devices but historical facts. Yet survival in the modern world is not secured by memory alone. Nations endure based on power, alliances, and the real consequences of political choices. It is in this context that Armenia’s post-Soviet trajectory—and its turn toward the West—demands sober reassessment.
Turkey’s policy toward Armenia has shown remarkable continuity since independence. Since 1993, Ankara has kept its border with Armenia closed, imposing economic isolation on a landlocked state. Normalization has always been conditioned on Armenian surrender: silence on the Armenian Genocide, abandonment of reparations and territorial claims, and compliance with Azerbaijani demands. The 2020 war removed any remaining illusions. Turkey did not merely support Azerbaijan diplomatically; it actively enabled military aggression through weapons, intelligence, training, and political cover. The result was the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh’s Armenian population.
Today, Turkey promotes the so-called “Zangezur Corridor,” now repackaged as a “connectivity” or “peace” project. Beneath the technocratic language lies a familiar objective: encircling Armenia, eroding its sovereignty, and advancing a pan-Turkic corridor from Ankara to Central Asia. The vocabulary has changed. The strategy has not.
Western involvement in this process did not begin in 2020. Its foundations were laid decades earlier through Track 2 and Track 1 diplomacy, designed to neutralize Armenian historical and political claims in the name of “reconciliation.”
The Turkish–Armenian Reconciliation Commission (TARC), established in 2001, was presented as a civil-society initiative but heavily supported by Western institutions. Its purpose was not justice, but reframing: shifting the Armenian Genocide from an established historical fact into a subject of bilateral discussion. The message was clear—recognition was an obstacle to peace, not a moral necessity.
This logic culminated in Track 1 diplomacy under President Serzh Sargsyan, with the signing of the Zurich Protocols in October 2009, under U.S., Swiss, and EU sponsorship. The protocols recognized existing borders, implicitly affirming the Treaty of Kars, and established a joint historical commission—effectively placing the Armenian Genocide on the negotiating table. In return, Turkey offered nothing upfront: no border opening, no recognition, no security guarantees.
Though never ratified and annulled in 2018, the protocols revealed the Western bargain in plain terms. Armenia was expected to surrender historical claims, mute genocide advocacy, and decouple Artsakh from its national interests in exchange for the promise of eventual acceptance into the Western political order.
Russia, by contrast, has dealt with Armenia in a fundamentally different—if imperfect—manner. Armenia’s history with Tsarist and Soviet rule is undeniably bloody, but geopolitics is not a morality play. In the post-Soviet period, Russia invested heavily in Armenia’s economy and infrastructure, provided security guarantees, sold arms at deep discounts, and formally recognized the Armenian Genocide through the State Duma. Armenia was treated as a strategic ally, not a moral project.
Russia has failed Armenia at critical moments, including during the Artsakh crisis. These failures deserve serious scrutiny. But there is a qualitative difference between an ally that falters and partners who never intended to defend you at all. Western engagement has consistently prioritized “regional stability,” meaning stability on Turkish and Azerbaijani terms, over Armenian survival.
The results are now undeniable. Armenia is smaller, more isolated, and more vulnerable than it was a decade ago. Artsakh is gone. Its borders are contested, its sovereignty increasingly conditional. The promised Western security umbrella never materialized.
Supporters of Armenia’s Western pivot argue that there was no alternative—that Artsakh was unsustainable, that Russia was unreliable, that alignment with the West was the only moral option. This framing is convenient, but false. Armenia did have choices: diversification without surrender, reform without capitulation, diplomacy without self-erasure. What it did not have was the luxury of confusing values with power.
The Ukrainian parallel is impossible to ignore. Ukraine was encouraged to trust Western guarantees, to surrender nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances, to believe that sovereignty would be defended by norms. Today, Ukraine fights heroically—but alone in blood, if not in rhetoric. Moral support does not stop missiles.
This is not an argument against democracy, reform, or engagement with the West. It is an argument against illusion. Small nations do not survive on statements and summits. They survive on deterrence, leverage, and alliances grounded in reality.
Armenia’s tragedy is not that it seeks peace. It is that it has repeatedly been asked to pay for peace with its land, its history, and its sovereignty. The question is no longer East versus West. The question is whether Armenia will exist as a sovereign state—or as a corridor, a concession, and a cautionary tale.
History has already shown us what extermination looks like. The present demands clarity about what survival requires.
Khatchig Tazian is a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation Western U.S. Central Committee.
