Author: Alessandro Sansoni – 23/05/2024
There is a “third front”, in addition to the Russian-Ukrainian and Israeli-Palestinian ones, of the so-called “piecemeal world war” that is being fought, which has been heating up in recent weeks.
What brings it to our attention is the tragic accident in which Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and his Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian died: the helicopter they were traveling on last Sunday crashed near a village called Tavil, located in a remote mountainous area of Eastern Azerbaijan. In the Caucasus. An area crossed by serious tensions, linked to the ongoing geopolitical crises, in particular that of Ukraine.
Let’s start from the west. In recent weeks there have been massive street demonstrations in Georgia against the government of Irakli Kobakhidze. They were caused by a controversial law “against foreign agents”, aimed at countering the action of the approximately 25 thousand NGOs operating on the national territory.
The President of the Republic Salome Zurabishvili strenuously opposes the measure which would orient the country’s politics in a pro-Russian direction. Several European leaders openly support the protest: the president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag Michael Roth marched in the square in Tbilisi on May 14, as did the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Estonia and Iceland a few days later.
If the Georgian executive considers these interferences unacceptable, the US Congress would be ready, according to Politico, to approve “a broad package of economic and military support” for Georgia, provided that its government abandons “its increasingly anti- Western world and stop backsliding on human rights.” Otherwise, sanctions would be forthcoming against members of the party in power. For the well-known analyst Francis Fukuyama, the negative trend in the war in Ukraine and the American delays in aid would be what brings Georgia ever closer to Moscow.
In fact, the events of the two countries are closely intertwined. The friction between Russia and the Atlantic Alliance arises precisely from Putin’s refusal to accept the entry of these two former Soviet states into NATO. Many will remember the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, when then-president Mikheil Saakashvili tried to reannex South Ossetia and Abkhazia, relying on Western support.
An episode that has made the local elites wary of Western pressure to sever the umbilical cord with the Kremlin, just as the recent events that have affected neighboring Armenia have not increased their trust.
Here, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s pro-Western turn last year caused the disaster of Azerbaijan’s reconquest of the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh with an Armenian majority and whose autonomy was guaranteed by Moscow. Tens of thousands of refugees have had to abandon their homes and seek refuge in their homeland, to which little aid has arrived from Europe and America. And in recent days, while demonstrations against the pro-Russian government were taking place in Tbilisi, massive protests were held in Everan to criticize Pashinyan’s pro-Western policy.
In short, the two Caucasian states are experiencing a symmetrical and opposite situation, on the brink of civil war.
Azerbaijan observes the evolving picture, strengthened by its gas and oil deposits, indispensable for Europe after the interruption of Russian supplies, and by its alliance with Turkey, to which it is united by ethno-linguistic reasons as well as by ability to insert itself into ongoing conflicts with sensational skill, winking, from time to time, at Moscow and Tehran, as well as at Washington and Brussels (and Tel Aviv).
The Caucasus, with Turkey, has become a fundamental energy hub for the EU and, in particular, for Italy which, through the TAP, receives copious quantities of Azeri gas on the Apulian coasts. The explosion of a conflict in that area would be disastrous, also because it would hermetically close the new iron curtain which in the last two years, starting from the Arctic and reaching the Red Sea, has interrupted the once flourishing commercial relations between Europe and its Eurasian hinterland.
The original version of this article was published in the Naples newspaper “Il Mattino” on 23 May 2024. We thank the Author for allowing its translation and publication on the Vision & Global Trends website.