Armenians at the brink of a new Cold War

By Raffy Ardhaldjian

The geopolitical environment surrounding Armenia is shifting in ways that can no longer be ignored. A multipolar world has taken shape, driven by decades of accumulated tension, the West’s post–Cold War eastward expansion, Russia’s red lines in Ukraine and its commitment to perceived national security interests, and the rise of China as a competing economic power. At the same time, shifts in the regional balance of power, most notably involving Türkiye, Iran, and Israel, are reshaping the greater Middle East and, by extension, the South Caucasus into a more volatile arena. Great-power competition has once again become the organizing principle of world politics, pushing the international system back toward spheres of influence and a new order. The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy already reflects this turn through “America First,” a modernized Monroe Doctrine, and an explicit claim to U.S. preeminence in the Americas.

This article does not attempt to analyze China, Russia, or the broader architecture of competing powers. The essential point is simpler. Situated at the intersection of old imperial borders, Armenians now find themselves entering a new world order and a new cold war.

Armenians have already felt the first shocks of this transition. Over the past decade, neo-imperial ambitions have collided across the immediate neighborhood. A fragile regional balance of power, long shaped by Russia’s post-Soviet presence, Türkiye’s projection of power, and persistent Western ambiguity, first gave way to the Four-Day War of 2016 and later to the 44-day war of 2020, followed by the catastrophic ethnic cleansing of Artsakh and its far-reaching consequences. The South Caucasus has since become a corridor where rival geopolitical forces intersect with increasing intensity.

Within this multipolar redistribution of power, Europe itself is awakening to new insecurities. Russia, China, the Turkic world, and increasingly India are advancing toward a more integrated Eurasian order, supported by expanding economic corridors, financial mechanisms, industrial cooperation, and technological platforms. This shift has been underway for some time and includes de-dollarization and the rise of multilateral frameworks such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS. Small nations that misread structural change risk becoming theaters rather than actors, as recent history in Ukraine and Moldova has shown. Even Armenia’s neighbor Georgia appears to have absorbed a hard lesson that allies do not necessarily share identical interests. Armenian political thought must grasp these seismic shifts and abandon moralized lenses that divide the world into forces that are “good” or “evil” toward Armenia, or that confuse Eurasian realities with European ones. Without such an intellectual recalibration, greater national tragedies remain not only possible but likely.

Foreign soft power has penetrated deeply into Armenia’s political life, both before and after the war. This is evident in the scale of foreign funding directed toward the construction of a performative civil society ecosystem and an ever-expanding Armenian media sphere, often detached from national priorities. As a result, public discourse has fractured into pro-Western and pro-Eastern camps, each treating geopolitical alignment as a test of moral loyalty rather than a strategic choice. Political actors increasingly amplify external narratives at the expense of sober assessments of national interest, turning what should be a pluralistic debate into hardened ideological fault lines that mirror global power blocs. This polarization now permeates nearly all aspects of Armenian life, including the Armenian Apostolic Church and segments of the Diaspora. It is further reinforced by the posture of the current administration, which has adopted an openly anti-Russian orientation at a moment when Ukraine’s position is deteriorating and the European Union itself is struggling to define the limits of its deterrence capacity, even as Armenia’s trade, energy supplies, and security arrangements remain vulnerable. Whether one supports or opposes this turn, its timing and strategic coherence deserve serious scrutiny for a small state with unresolved security dilemmas and little margin for error.

Divided loyalties are not new in Armenian history. For centuries, Armenians lived under competing empires, and internal camps often formed around rival external patrons. These divisions were not merely tactical adaptations but reflected failures to articulate and defend a shared national interest. In the modern era, this pattern hardened during the Cold War, when geopolitical alignment became ideological identity. Armenian communities, in both the homeland and the diaspora, split along pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet lines, producing institutional fractures, deep mistrust, and, in some cases, political violence and loss of life. The lesson is enduring: when external power struggles are internalized through competing camps, national cohesion erodes precisely when it is most needed.

These dynamics place Armenians at the brink of a new cold war. A defeated army has not yet been rebuilt. The displacement from Artsakh has not been fully absorbed. Turkish and Azerbaijani military cooperation is at its peak. State institutions are under strain, while society is deeply polarized between those rooted in civilizational continuity and those who view identity and statehood in narrower and more temporary terms. Concurrently, democratic practice and constitutional order show signs of erosion, further weakening national resilience.

At the same time, Azerbaijan–Türkiye relations continue to deepen across political, military, and economic domains. If land access from Azerbaijan to Nakhijevan, and onward to Türkiye, is established through Armenia’s Syunik region, Ankara would lose any remaining incentive to normalize relations with Armenia or pursue reciprocal border openings. Yet many self-described “peace activists,” often aligned with Westernized policy circles, continue to treat Azerbaijan and Türkiye as functional extensions of Western influence, urging negotiation despite Armenia’s limited leverage. This view ignores the reality that Ankara’s South Caucasus policy is anchored in an “Azerbaijan First” framework and reflects Türkiye’s autonomous regional strategy rather than Western alignment (Poghosyan 2025). More importantly, Türkiye views Russia as an enduring factor in regional geopolitics to be managed rather than confronted, seeking a flexible Russia–Türkiye understanding while limiting the long-term influence of the United States, the European Union, and NATO. In this context, a narrow “pivot to the West” risks placing Armenia in an increasingly precarious position.

A growing national narrative presents Armenia as facing a binary choice between the West and Russia. This framing is both misleading and risky. Armenia is neither a Western outpost nor a subordinate extension of any power bloc. Its geographic exposure and political constraints instead place it in a position where balance and restraint are structural conditions rather than preferences. The more important concern is the fixation of the current authorities on securing rapid “peace agreements” without addressing underlying power asymmetries and unresolved structural causes, a posture that risks locking Armenia into disadvantages it may be structurally incapable of correcting later.

Public discussion among Armenians today is dominated by confrontational rhetoric between East and West at its core. But the more fundamental questions remain unanswered. Where, exactly, are we going? What kind of cold war is emerging around us ? And what does it mean for a small, exposed state situated at the intersection of competing powers ?

This article does not argue for a specific geopolitical vector. Armenia is sufficiently small, vulnerable, and strategically exposed that it cannot afford to treat geopolitical alignment as an ideological preference rather than a survival calculation. In a world sliding toward a new cold war, the more urgent task is internal clarity rather than external alignment. For a small and exposed state, internal clarity is not an abstract ideal but a strategic requirement. Without a shared national framework, legitimacy, cohesion, and endurance under sustained external pressure inevitably weaken. This requires recognizing Armenians as one historic nation, today a Transnation, whose millennial history has produced a small modern state on the last remaining part of their native homeland, regardless of political views. In this context, a governing force that failed to prevent, manage, or mitigate a disastrous war, and that secured the support of only 26.65 percent of the total registered electorate, lacks the structural legitimacy required for drastic geopolitical pivots before a broader national consensus and internal clarity have been restored. This question will be explored further in my next article, “Armenians Between Transnation and State,” in the series on the Armenian National Project.

The wounds of the 44-day war have not healed, nor has the exodus from Artsakh been fully absorbed. Strategic clarity has yet to be regained. Armenia cannot afford to enter a new era of global confrontation fragmented, unprepared, and driven by emotionally charged narratives. The first task is national sobriety, an honest reckoning with where the nation stands, what has been lost, and what form of nationhood is required to endure the cold war of the coming years.

Selected References

Poghosyan, Benyamin. “Türkiye’s Policy in the South Caucasus: Navigating Normalization Efforts Amid Ankara’s ‘Azerbaijan First’ Policy.” Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia (APRI Armenia), October 2025.
Walt, Stephen M. The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Tölölyan, Khachig. “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless in the Transnational Moment.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 5, no. 1 (1996): 3–36.
International Crisis Group. South Caucasus reports, various years.

Raffy Ardhaldjian is a Fletcher School graduate and advisor to tech companies, public institutions, and NGOs. In his spare time, he writes about strategic topics spanning Armenia and the Armenian diaspora.