EVN Security Report: January 2024

Introduction

The structural factors shaping the regional security environment indicated a pending negative trend in January, as Azerbaijan displayed clear indications of its endeavor of obstructing the peace process, while Armenia, though speaking in the language of peace, continued its policy of foreign and security diversification. Within these intertwining developments, Azerbaijan proceeded to strategically and preemptively downgrade its relations with the West, thus establishing a manageable distance between Western pressure and Baku’s set regional and domestic objectives. Armenia, on the other hand, further enhanced its institutional and political relations with the West, while managing the continued decoupling from Russia. 

The cumulative developments indicate two growing trends: the anticipation that Azerbaijan is methodically establishing the foundations to hostilities by claiming stagnation in the peace process, and Armenia capitalizing on Azerbaijan’s obstructionist behavior to cajole the West into affirming enforceable red lines against Baku. Noting the instrumentalization of warfare as the dominant and preferred strategic tool of the Aliyev regime, a rationalist explanation of war, as a prominent framework borrowed from conflict and security studies, will be introduced to address the causal mechanisms shaping Aliyev’s incentives for being conflict-prone. 

Rationalist Explanation for the Aliyev Regime’s Preference for War

While Armenia has remained steadfast in its policy of seeking peace in the face of Baku’s bellicosity, in January official Yerevan became more vocal on the detrimental effects of Aliyev’s obstructionism, with more visible concerns being expressed by Prime Minister Pashinyan and Foreign Minister Mirzoyan. Pashinyan noted that the setback in the negotiation process, due to the new proposals made by Baku, are not so much cogent proposals or constructive mechanisms with which the two sides may work on, but rather, are designed to lead to a breakdown in the talks, which Aliyev will utilize as a tenable basis to “legitimize future wars.” These concrete concerns were also echoed by Mirzoyan, who not only addressed Azerbaijan’s strategic approach to being purposefully unconstructive, but also the growing concern that Baku is seeking to engage in methodical escalation. With the extant discourse suggesting a consensus regarding Aliyev’s preference for use of force and militarized conflict management, the “rationalist explanation of war” is applied to account for the decision-making and policy preferences of the Aliyev regime. 

The rationalist explanations for war contend that leaders, engaging in rational calculation, end up preferring war even when considering risks and costs associated with war. In this context, war is qualified as a rational alternative for a leader who is presumptively acting in its state’s interest, where the benefits of war are deemed to outweigh the expected costs. Conceptually qualified as “wanted wars,” as opposed to unwanted or accidentally escalatory wars, this is the underlying modality of war that defines the preference of the Aliyev regime. For the Aliyev regime, wanted wars with Armenia are thought to be Pareto-efficient: they must occur because no negotiated settlement can exist with Armenia and as such, the gamble of military conflict is preferred. In this context, war is rational for the Aliyev regime because the expected positive utility for fighting is greater than the expected utility of remaining at peace. To this end, expected loss, for Baku, is diminished in its preference for war, and the utility of remaining at peace is qualified within the domain of loss. In more simple terms, peace is deemed an irrational preference for the Aliyev regime. 

Borrowing from the body of scholarship on the subject, three general causal explanations are posited to account for the preference for war.  First, leaders may be unable to locate mutually preferable negotiated outcomes due to lack of information on relative capabilities or incentives and thus misinterpret such information. Specifically, a given leader knows things about one’s own military capabilities and willingness to fight that the opposing state does not, and in bargaining situations, it is incentivized to misrepresent such information in order to gain a maximum outcome. This approach is defined by the specific strategic dynamics that result from the combination of asymmetrical information and power capabilities. Within the context of the 2020 War, Azerbaijan misrepresented its own military capabilities (it had accumulated much more military power than what the outside world was able to know), though always reserving the right to wage war, and as such, its subterfuge on its actual capabilities remained a fundamental causal factor for initiating hostilities. Armenia, on the other hand, exaggerated its own capabilities, and in this context, the bargaining situation was defined by asymmetrical information, which camouflaged the asymmetrical power disparity. Operating off of this incentivization structure even after 2020, Aliyev is rationally driven to prefer war and conflict-prone outcomes, because it enhances the probability of a maximalist outcome. In this context, it is in the strategic interests of Baku, and as such, a rationalist preference for Aliyev, to favor “wanted war.”

Second, rationalist leaders may not be able to arrange a settlement, and thus prefer war due to “commitment problems.” Namely, commitment pertains to a certain establishment of trust that is not attainable or satisfactory for either side, and for this reason, mutually preferable bargains or settlements become unattainable, because either actor will have an incentive to renege. Prior to the 2020 War, the positions of either side were so diametrically opposed that the minimal level of compromise required to ascertain the simplest form of peace had become untenable, in what was qualified as the “incoherence of peace.” In the post-2020 period, however, the commitment dilemma has become a unidirectional problem: Azerbaijan is incentivized to renege, since it cannot commit to peace. Even in the face of empirically identifiable mechanisms (mutual withdrawal of troops, international observer missions, demilitarized zones, etc.) that could avoid the costs of war, the Aliyev regime remains noncommittal, because reneging is a more rational preference for the regime than committing. More so, Baku is using the “commitments problem” postulate from pre-2020 to disrupt any commitments that it may be forced to make in a peace treaty: namely, it is arguing that Armenia has revanchist aspirations and that one day, when strengthened, it will seek to reconquer Nagorno-Karabakh. In this context, it is using the “spiral model argument:” it is not only accusing Armenia of future “commitment problems,” but it is preempting the possibility of Armenia reneging in the future by actually disrupting the possibility of any commitments being formed. As such, Aliyev’s commitment problems are precisely designed to rationally enhance the regime’s preference for war.

Third, leaders may be unable to locate a preference for a peaceful settlement due to “issue indivisibilities.” This causal framework denotes that some issues, by their very natures, are simply not conducive to compromise, and issues that exhibit indivisibility make war rational. Prior to the 2020 War, Azerbaijan’s position had become unequivocal: if the status quo does not change on Baku’s terms, then war would be the remedy of choice, because issue indivisibility has made compromise impossible. To this end, if compromise is not reached, the status quo will be preserved; a net positive for Armenia, yet a loss for Azerbaijan. Thus, initiating the 2020 War was a judicious preference for the Aliyev regime, because issue indivisibility, in principle, made war rational. In the post-2020 period, Aliyev has made issue indivisibility the cornerstone of his obstructionist strategy, for this has allowed him to constantly change the goal post in the negotiation process, while consistently rearticulating his maximalist posturing. The more Armenia has mitigated the problem of issue indivisibility by compromising or agreeing to difficult concessions, the more Aliyev has constructed new and artificial issues, thus making potentially solvable issues effectively indivisible. To this end, the perpetuation of issue indivisibility, as a causal variable, makes war highly likely, and this, in essence, is the underlying rational objective and preferred outcome of the Aliyev regime.        

Conclusion: Armenia’s 25 Years of Irrationalism

While the rationalist models for war offer a window into the causal explanations for the Aliyev regime’s two decades of preparation and subsequent preference for war, what accounts for the 25 years of policy failures and inchoate decision-making by Armenia’s leaders? If it was open knowledge that Aliyev’s life-long goal was the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, and that the entire institutions of his regime were designed, funded, and prepared for such an end, what accounts for Armenia’s negligible response to Azerbaijan’s two decade-long process of disrupting the military balance of power? If it was evident that Azerbaijan was continuously accruing large quantities of advanced weaponry, and instrumentalizing the oil profits of the state for the singular purpose of creating a power disparity with Armenia, what rationalist policies were Armenia’s leaders developing to mitigate or control for such developments? Collectively, Armenia’s policies and preferences for the last 25 years were not defined by rationalist models of preventive war, but rather, an awkward combination of wishful thinking and overreliance on Russia. In essence, Armenia’s leadership suffered from two decades of irrationalism.  

As the scholarship on this topic demonstrates, the inability to cogently gauge the growing disparity in relative power between opposing states against whom war remains highly probable is a consequence of irrationality. Namely, the unfounded optimism about victory in war, and a prevailing product of “moods which cannot be grounded in fact,” dominated political thinking in Armenia the last 25 years, a modality of thinking that permeated what appeared “to be rational assessments of the relative strength of two contending” enemies. Unfortunately, such thinking was fundamentally devoid of rationalist modeling. As such, irrational assessments gave way to a faux culture of optimism, or self-deception, a “process by which nations evade reality,” thus developing policies or making decisions devoid of the rationalist paradigm. More specifically, “emotional commitments could irrationally bias leader’s military estimates,” such as believing in their own “nationalistic rhetoric” that their “soldiers are more courageous and spirited than those of the adversary.” In essence, while Azerbaijan developed a rationalist policy of war, Armenia engaged in irrational myth-making; while Azerbaijan developed a war machine funded by oil revenues, Armenia clung to a Russia-savior complex; and when Azerbaijan implemented its rationalist preference for “wanted war,” all Yerevan could do is suffer for the failures of its two decades of irrational security thinking. 

Azerbaijan’s rationalist preference for war must be countered by Armenia’s rationalist preference for preventive war. But having fallen behind by over a decade, at least transitioning from irrational, wishful thinking to rationalist policy-making can speed up the closing of the gap. Armenia does not need to establish parity with Azerbaijan: that is not a rational option. But Armenia can develop the resilience capabilities to prevent the Aliyev regime from seeking wanted wars. Noting the incentives of the Aliyev regime, its “commitment problems,” and its weaponization of “issue indivisibility,” Armenia’s rationalist policy of preventive war must now incorporate the expected utility of seeking peace: deter and prepare.