Realpolitika’s Giorgi Loladze sat down with Ambassador Matthew Bryza, who completed a twenty-three-year career as a US diplomat with responsibilities in the South Caucasus and Caspian regions, to discuss the regional geopolitics.
Ambassador Bryza has been intimately involved in these affairs, lastly as US ambassador to Azerbaijan from February 2011 to January 2012. From 2005 to 2009, Ambassador Bryza served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, with responsibility for the South Caucasus, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and Eurasian energy. Ambassador Bryza simultaneously served as the US co-chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) Minsk Group, mediating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and as US mediator of the Cyprus, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia conflicts.
Below is the transcript of the interview, which has been insignificantly altered for style before publication.
Georgia and the United States
How would you assess the present state of relations between Georgia and the United States, and what are the prospects for their normalization?
I think the relationship has continued under the momentum and direction taken during the Biden administration, because President Trump has not engaged, as far as I can tell, at all on Georgia.
Having been at the center of what the US was doing during the presidency of George W. Bush, I know how much president Bush cared about developments in Georgia, to help Georgia achieve its historic opportunities after the Rose Revolution, to modernize and strengthen political and economic freedom, to help secure local environment in terms of both internal stability and the hope that Russia would not attack Georgia. For President Trump, many countries are just not on his agenda, period.
He has a very good relationship with Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. I was just in Budapest, but we have no ambassador there, and it doesn’t look like any ambassador will be coming anytime soon. President Trump’s not engaged.
That President Trump did get so involved with Azerbaijan and Armenia was a surprise to everybody, including myself, who has spent so much time on those issues. I think in Azerbaijan and Armenia, he saw the low-hanging diplomatic fruit, an opportunity for the US to step in and help move the countries toward a peace agreement. And [President Trump] wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Georgia has played itself out of the geopolitical game as far as Washington is concerned.
When it comes to Georgia, where’s the opportunity for the US president to do anything?! The domestic political situation is, at best, stagnant, but also so tense, with such a high level of emotion.
It is really hard for me to say this, but Georgia has played itself out of the geopolitical game as far as Washington is concerned, unfortunately.
The parliamentary commission established by Georgian Dream officially accused the previous government of initiating the war against Russia and the separatist regions. How might these affect Georgia’s non-recognition policy and diplomacy more broadly?
I haven’t read that report, but having been in the middle of everything [in 2008], to me it is utterly ridiculous and untrue, and for Georgia deeply unhelpful in the quest for the objectives you talked about, to say something that is so patently wrong.
It is false, it’s not true, and anyone with a functioning mind knows what Russia was doing. Russia was, of course, trying to provoke Georgia, but it was maneuvering Georgia into a dead end.
A very senior white house official told me in May 2008: “Wow, President Saakashvili is left with no good option, either he goes to war with Russia or he capitulates to Russia’s demands and loses Georgian territory. And we need to find a way to create other choices. To avoid war and to avoid Georgia surrendering its territory.”
Georgia did not cause that war; Russia wanted it, and Russia provoked it.
So, Russia engineered all of that. We could talk for hours about all the steps it took from the mid-1990s onward to maneuver Georgia into that situation.
So no, Georgia did not cause that war; Russia wanted it, and Russia provoked it. It was indeed the firing of artillery over the heads of Russian peacekeepers by the South Ossetians that Russia accepted and blessed, which started the war.
Yes, Georgia fired back, what was it supposed to do when it’s under attack by artillery, illegally stationed on Georgian territory?
Peace Treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan
Turning now to the Armenia–Azerbaijan peace treaty, arguably the most significant recent development in the South Caucasus. In your view, how sustainable is this agreement given its unpopularity in Armenia? And also, to what extent do you think Azerbaijan is ready to meet its obligations fully?
I said before how hugely and pleasantly surprised I was that President Trump got so involved. When I was the US mediator, or the US Co-chair of the OSCE’s Minsk Group, I consistently made the point, that unless and until the US president is personally involved, putting his prestige on the line and using the full force of US diplomacy to provide political cover to the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan to take very difficult political decisions of compromise, there will never be a peace agreement. Nobody trusts Vladimir Putin, the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis never did. They have to respect him, but they don’t trust him. And France [as Minsk Group Co-Chair] is inconsequential; it would have been better perhaps to have the European Union as one of the co-chairs. So you look at the Minsk group co-chairs, and the US is the most powerful country, and that should be worth something. President Trump recognized that, and he did something.
[President Trump] did not do what he claims to have done – he didn’t end the war. What he did was provide a forum, and his clout.
He did not do what he claims to have done – he didn’t end the war. What he did was provide a forum and his clout and prestige to provide an opportunity for the foreign ministers of Azerbaijan and Armenia to initial the peace treaty, the text of which was already agreed by them back in March of this year. But the presidents have not signed that treaty, so it doesn’t exist.
There is one very important obstacle still out there, one major one, and that is Azerbaijan’s insistence that Armenia amend its constitution to eliminate any ambiguity about whether Armenia recognizes Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity, or to put it differently, denies that it has any territorial claims against Azerbaijan. The Armenian constitution of today makes reference to the declaration of independence of 1988 by the ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh from the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, and so suggests it does not recognize Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity with Karabakh and all the seven surrounding regions.
[Armenia’s President Nicol] Pashinyan wants that amendment, but he faces opposition in the parliament. He needs a supermajority to get that amendment approved, and he may get that, but then it has to be ratified through popular vote, and there is strong opposition in Armenia to that vote. I heard yesterday from an Armenian person based in Brussels that something like 60-65% of the Armenian population in a recent public opinion poll believes that the conflict should be revisited, that it’s not over, and that there could be a new armed struggle to recover those territories of Azerbaijan where Armenians used to live.
I think that Azerbaijan is asking for a lot [from Armenia in demanding] for there to be a constitutional referendum.
That is what I’m worried about, I’m worried that we’re not gonna get to that amendment being passed to the Constitution. I think that Azerbaijan is asking for a lot [in demanding] for there to be a constitutional referendum. On the other hand, it is difficult to sign a peace treaty with a country whose constitution suggests that it wants to take your territory back again.
But having said all of that, I have no doubt that Azerbaijan will fulfill all of its commitments under that agreement, as long as the agreement happens, and that means as long as the amendment is made to the Armenian constitution. And it is important to recognize that Azerbaijan wants that peace treaty, is investing a lot of money toward and into connecting to the Zangezur corridor. But we may not get to the peace treaty.
Next year, Armenia will hold crucial parliamentary elections, where this peace agreement may become a central issue. There are widespread concerns that Russia could attempt to interfere. How do you assess the likelihood of such interference, and what tools might Russia employ against Armenia’s current government?
I would bet all of the money that I have ever earned and will ever earn on Russia doing whatever it can to destabilize the situation, so first I’ll talk about the motivation and then the means.
I always felt, in my time working on these issues, that Russia was negotiating in good faith to try to get to a framework agreement, to outline the talks that would happen years in the future for a peace treaty. So, my counterpart and foreign minister, [Sergey] Lavrov, they were great. They would brainstorm in good faith, knowing that if the parties agreed to a framework, they were never going to get to a treaty. So Russia gets points for looking collaborative, for building better relations with Azerbaijan and Armenia, but will always maintain the ability to, as we say in colloquial English, stir the pot because there won’t be a peace treaty.
And if you look at the second motivation, if you look at the November 10, 2020, ceasefire statement that was signed by Putin, Aliyev, and Pashinyan, in the space about the corridor linking the main Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan, it says that the corridor will be controlled by the FSB and border guards.
Now, with the Washington agreements and this new Trump International Road for Peace and Prosperity, that corridor will be operated by a US company. So FSB is gone, and the US is in, in the form of companies.
That is a big strategic humiliation for Russia, and Russia is saying that the November 2020 ceasefire is still valid. So they’re gonna say that the Trump agreement is not valid because the November 2020 agreement is valid, giving the FSB the right to be on the Azerbaijan territory. That’s a big problem.
The third motivation is that in the joint strategic partnership agreements that were also signed in August in Washington between the US and Azerbaijan on one hand, and the US and Armenia on the other hand, one of the topics of [the planned] cooperation is border security.
Azerbaijan is the only country on earth that shares borders with Russia and Iran, so the US is somehow going to be involved in that border security, which will really upset Russia. Same for Armenia, as you know, Russian FSB border guards guard the border between Turkey and Armenia.
I think [Russia] will use their full range of means to destabilize Armenian politics, to see the demise of Nikol Pashinyan.
So Russia has three sets of motivation to prevent the treaty from being implemented. I think they will use their full range of means to destabilize Armenian politics, to see the demise of Nikol Pashinyan. It can be through propaganda,it will be through active measures, money, bribery, hopefully not physical harm to people.
But I think President Putin feels that he has been humiliated by this agreement. He has to play it carefully with President Trump, especially on Ukraine, but that will not stop him from using every means he has to prevent the implementation of this agreement.
Many in Georgia are concerned that the opening of the new corridor could undermine the country’s role as a key transit route and diminish its strategic importance, potentially shifting regional attention away from Georgia. Do you agree?
I don’t at all. First of all, as I said before, Georgia has already made itself much less strategically important in a general sense because of its domestic political mess. In terms of the actual transport corridor, it’s not healthy in the long run if Georgia thinks it can benefit only if Armenia is isolated. That is not a healthy way to organize the Southern Caucasus.
It is not healthy in the long run if Georgia thinks it can benefit only if Armenia is isolated.
A third point is the so-called “middle corridor”, which transports goods first across the Caspian and then through Azerbaijan and Georgia, onward to the Black Sea in Georgia or to Türkiye, is severely bottlenecked and inefficient. It requires massive investment, which should have happened years ago but hasn’t.
There needs to be more ships built in the Caspian, and that’s not Georgia’s issue. There needs to be more rail cars purchased by the rail lines, which is a Georgia issue. Roads need to be improved, and the efficiency of the port operations also needs to be dramatically improved; those are Georgia issues. Georgia should have been investing in this all this time, and it didn’t.
So, the Zangezur corridor will provide a new route. I think that if you open up a new corridor, it will allow for more transport, more money to be invested, and incentives for higher volumes across the board of cargoes, which then can be used to invest also in improving the transport through Georgia.
So, no, I don’t think that the Zangezur corridor needs to hurt Georgia or set Georgia back any further than it already is in terms of the potential for more cargo shipments and logistics.
Regional Relations in the South Caucasus
How do you assess the prospects for Armenia’s normalization of relations with Turkey, and what opportunities might such a process create for Armenia?
For at least the last three years or so, there have been meetings between Armenian and Turkish envoys. They just finished their 6th round of talks. They have very specific proposals on the table for opening up a land border crossing, normalizing transport, renovating a medieval bridge, and increasing the number of flights between Istanbul and Yerevan. They’re really thinking through what to do as part of normalization and there really is a desire by both countries to normalize.
You’ll recall that in 2009, of course, a normalization process and a set of agreements between Armenia and Turkey that were never ratified by the parliaments, and that’s because the Turkish parliament will never and the Turkish government will never stab Azerbaijan in the back. We all know the slogan: “one nation, two states”. Turkiye closed this border in 1993 with Armenia in solidarity with Azerbaijan and will do nothing, nothing to betray Azerbaijan.
Turkiye will do nothing, nothing to betray Azerbaijan.
I remember back in 2009, I was involved in the Nagorno-Karabakh process, but also the Turkey-Armenia process, because President Obama was so in favor of it. I’ll just never forget I arrived in Baku for some Nagorno-Karabakh business, I saw a very senior Azerbaijani minister, a ministerial official in the lounge waiting to depart. I said, “Oh, where are you going, Mister Minister?” and he said, “I’m going to Ankara”. I looked at him and said “No”, he said “yeah, I’m going to kill that agreement, because Turkey can’t sell out Azerbaijan”.
I think that we will see a very rapid normalization of Armenia-Turkey relations once the peace treaty happens between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but if not, I don’t think we’ll see normalization of Armenia-Turkey relations.
While tensions between Azerbaijan and Russia have recently subsided, they demonstrated Azerbaijan’s boldness and independence in its decision-making. How do you foresee the future trajectory of Azerbaijan’s relationship with Russia?
Well, I think that the relations are still quite tense, but you’re right, they haven’t deteriorated at the fast pace that had been happening since Russian air defences shot down the AZAL jetliner over Grozny so horribly and tragically in December. The relations are now terrible, but that won’t go on forever, it can’t. We already discussed that Azerbaijan is the only country in the world that shares borders with Russia and Iran, so therefore it has to be really careful and conduct a multivector foreign policy.
I think a lot of what has happened between Azerbaijan and Russia since last December is emotional. President Aliyev is understandably and maybe even rightfully furious that President Putin won’t admit Russia’s responsibility for this tragic act and apologize or offer reparations. That’s not how friends treat other friends.
But this too shall pass, time heals all, and Azerbaijan’s leadership knows that it really, in the long run, can’t afford a serious breach in relations with Russia.
Azerbaijan’s leadership knows that it really, in the long run, can’t afford a serious breach in relations with Russia.
At the same time, Azerbaijan’s foreign policy is bold. It is really building strong relations across the Caspian with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, as well. And it’s becoming a player in the Middle East. For a long time, it provided Israel 40% of its crude oil, and has a technological-military relationship with Israel. Now, Azerbaijan is also delivering Azerbaijani natural gas to Syria via Turkey and hosted, I guess, the ministers of Israel and Syria not long ago. So, Azerbaijan is really stepping up as a regional power of geopolitical significance and importance.
In partnership with the United States, which I really hope and pray continues, and that President Trump remains focused, Azerbaijan has a chance to elevate itself even further. And that also helps the country to have some confidence that if it feels mistreated by Russia, it doesn’t need to simply cave in.
My next question concerns Iran: its relations with Azerbaijan have long been complex. How do you think it would react to the new agreement with Armenia?
Iran’s reaction to the Washington agreements has been unexpectedly mild. There was one statement that came out of, I think, the foreign ministry that was highly critical, but then from the presidency, there was a much softer statement, basically saying, we’re not against this agreement, we want there to be peace, but as long as Iran’s sovereignty is not somehow violated.
And I think that’s a way of saying that the Zangezur corridor, from Iran’s perspective, can not be used to reduce Iran’s freedom to operate, to trade, and have transport into and across Armenia.
I think that’s a workable issue. When I was the US mediator for the Karabakh conflict, we used to talk about the Lachin corridor, and there were analogous concerns. We were thinking through how to build viaducts, bridges, tunnels through the transit route, or through the road, or over the roads, so that others could continue their transit. That’s a workable, technical, easy issue.
I think their most significant concern could be the US presence in this corridor.
Yeah, well, too bad, they don’t get a vote on that, right? So they’re gonna have to learn to live with that, especially now that they are weak. Israel has destroyed their air defences, showed what it can do, the US showed what it can do to Iran’s nuclear program, and Trump stopped, it looks to me, he stopped Netanyahu from going further.
Netanyahu was executing senior leadership of the Iranian government and of its nuclear program and could turn that back on. And you may recall that the supreme leader of Iran vanished from public view for weeks, like Stalin did in June of 1941, when Hitler invaded. I think he was worried about being targeted.
And so that shows there’s a lack of confidence at the top of the clerical regime in Iran. Of course, the population is deeply unhappy and impatient with the terrible state of the economy of Iran, so I think Iran is limited in what it can do. I think Russia is much more experienced and has greater capabilities at meddling inside of both Azerbaijan, but really inside of Armenia, not to mention Georgia.
My final question: how would you assess China’s potential role in transforming the region?
Georgia is the only country or one of the only countries that has free trade agreements with both the European Union and China. That was the great hope that Anaklia port was going to be, that it would grow, that there would be US investment, and that it would operate like a normal port. China would be able to use it, but wouldn’t be able to monopolize it. Georgia would prosper, and that whole middle corridor would grow bigger. And now it looks like maybe the government in Georgia wants it to be a Chinese port, I don’t know.
When it comes to the middle corridor, the Trump administration is not fighting Chinese involvement.
In any case, Washington doesn’t seek conflict with China, if we keep aside the policy of strategic ambiguity over Taiwan. When it comes to the middle corridor, the Trump administration is not fighting Chinese involvement; there needs to be more investment in the middle corridor. China is expanding its presence in Central Asia and has now surpassed Russia as the Central Asian states’ biggest trading partner.
But countries are not always comfortable with Chinese investment because it comes with conditions and dependencies. And when countries like Pakistan are unable to repay loans for infrastructure projects, those projects become owned by Chinese entities.
So, it’s up to Azerbaijan and Georgia and Armenia to figure out how much Chinese investment and how much influence they want, but so far China has not at all been negative on this agreement, the Washington agreements and in fact the restoration of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity is entirely in line with China’s number one foreign policy objective, restoring its own territorial integrity.
