Turkey advances in the South Caucasus

Ankara is benefiting from Russia’s waning influence and Iran’s many problems

Though his military forces are still in the process of absorbing Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev met on September 25 with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The timing of the meeting was noteworthy, but the deeper significance was the location: in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan, wedged between Armenia and Iran, with a tiny border with Turkey.

In a joint press conference, Aliyev lamented the severing of mainland Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan during the Soviet era, while Erdogan spoke about the potential for a trade corridor from Turkey to Nakhchivan through Armenia’s Syunik province, which borders Iran.

Azerbaijan and Armenia should reach a peace settlement quickly, Erdogan said, to clear the way for the opening of this route, known as the Zangezur corridor.

The apparent resolution of the three-decades long conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region surrounded by Azerbaijan, but inhabited largely by ethnic Armenians, marks a victory for Azerbaijan over its neighbor Armenia. But at a higher level, it also reflects creeping changes in the balance of power among major regional players.

Russia, Turkey and Iran historically have competed for control of the harsh topography between the Caspian and Black seas that constitutes the South Caucasus. At the moment, the Russians are struggling to retain their influence along their southern periphery while waging war on their western flank.

Taking advantage of Russia’s waning influence, the Turks seem to be progressing in their efforts to establish a transCaspian connection with Central Asia. But Turkey’s push eastward is a major threat to the Iranians on their northern frontier at a time when their regime is in the throes of an extraordinary transition.

Russia

This geopolitical realignment in the South Caucasus is a major departure from the regional security architecture that Moscow had maintained since the 19th century.

Czarist Russia took control of the region from the Persian Qajar dynasty after the last Russo-Persian war, which ended in the late 1820s. Armenians and Azerbaijanis battled one another for a couple of years during Russia’s transition from czarist to Soviet regimes.

The region’s existing borders were drawn when the Soviets reorganized it into the Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani socialist republics between April 1920 and April 1921.

The First Nagorno-Karabakh War began well before the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Despite the upheaval caused by the USSR’s implosion, the Russians maintained their dominance over the region.

Moscow restored the balance of power with a 1994 ceasefire that left Nagorno-Karabakh and other adjacent areas of Azerbaijan under Armenian control. This arrangement continued until the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War broke out in late 2020 when Azerbaijan, backed by its Turkish allies, managed to turn the tables on Armenia.

Russia, preoccupied with the strategically far more important matter of Ukraine, opposed this reversal in the South Caucasus. It certainly did not want the Turks to upend the delicate balance it had been managing.

While preparing for war in Ukraine, the Russians were forced to mediate a cessation of hostilities. But when Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine failed to go as planned, the Turkish-Azerbaijani alliance sensed an opening to completely seize Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Kremlin had to abandon its Armenian allies.

Turkey

During the medieval era, the Black Sea was known as an Ottoman lake, yet the Turkish empire controlled only small areas of the South Caucasus along its coast, largely in what is modern-day Georgia and Armenia. The bulk of the region was contested territory between the Russians and the Persians.

From the Ottoman point of view, Europe and the Middle East were far more important. By the time the Russians took the region from the Persians, the Ottomans were in an advanced state of decline. World War I locked the region in its current place.

Throughout the Cold War, Turkey was a key NATO member state along the U.S. containment line against the Soviet Union. Its desire to be part of the West rendered it inert in terms of unilateral geopolitical moves.

After the collapse of the USSR, Turkey did seek to enhance its influence with the newly independent states in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, especially given the shared Turkic heritage. However, Ankara was mired in internal political and economic crises, and these regions remained firmly tethered to the Russian Federation.

Under the Erdogan regime, Turkey has sought greater freedom for unilateral foreign policy moves while maintaining its status as a member of NATO. Similarly, while Turkey has grown closer to Russia, it is also exploiting

Moscow’s declining strategic influence to expand its own, especially in the Russian near abroad.

After failing to make inroads into the Middle East by leveraging their shared Sunni Muslim religiosity, the Turks have turned their attention to Central Asia, where they can leverage a common ethnic identity. Backing Azerbaijan and establishing the corridor through the South Caucasus are critical parts of its strategy to try to fill the vacuum Russia is leaving behind in Central Asia.

Iran

Persian control over the broader Caucasus region dates back to antiquity. After the collapse of the last pre-Islamic Persian dominion, the Sassanid Empire, in the 7th century, the South Caucasus fell under the control of various Arab caliphates for several hundred years.

In the early 11th century, following the decline of the Arab power, the Seljuk Turks asserted their authority over the region. It would remain under Central Asian powers through the Mongol and Timurid empires from the 13th through the 15th centuries. The Persians regained control with the revival of their power in the form of the Shiite Safavid Empire in the 1500s.

Despite many wars with the Ottomans and the Russians, the Persians were able to maintain control over the bulk of the South Caucasus for three centuries. But by about 1850, the weakening of the Persians under the Qajar dynasty enabled the Russians to consolidate their hold over the region. The current northern borders of Iran with the South Caucasus were established with the Treaty of Gulistan (1813) and the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828) between czarist Russia and Qajar Iran. Modern-day Iran became part of the British sphere of influence during Britain’s Great Game struggle with the Russian Empire, and then an American ally during the Cold War.

Even after the establishment of the current clerical regime in 1979, with its aggressive foreign policy, the South Caucasus was beyond its reach until the dissolution of the USSR.

Tehran tried to use Shiite Islamism to regain influence in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, which is a Shiite-majority country, and Iran has been an ally of the Armenians in their long conflict with the Azerbaijanis. However, the Iranians faced serious limitations because of their focus on the Arab world, Russian influence in the Caucasus and the fact that about a quarter of all Iranians are ethnically Azeri and inhabit two provinces (West and East Azerbaijan) located along the border with Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Iranians long took comfort in the fact that Armenia controlled Nagorno-Karabkah and many of the surrounding areas, especially along the border with Iran. The reversal that began in 2020 and reached completion last week comes at a very bad time for the Iranians, whose domestic political economy is at a critical juncture.

The Iranians now face a hostile and strengthened Azerbaijan with potential strategic depth in northern Iran. There is also the ongoing penetration that Israel has inside the Islamic Republic through its relations with Baku. But perhaps most important, the Turks now have influence over Iran’s northern flank – something that even the Ottomans did not achieve over their Persian rivals.

Meanwhile, after the loss of influence in the AzerbaijaniArmenian theater, Russia is concerned about a domino effect in Georgia, where its forces occupy the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and even the North Caucasus, which is formally part of the Russian Federation and where Moscow fought two wars in the 1990s to maintain control.