Analyst Cory Welt: The United States should call for Yerevan to pursue a withdrawal from Azerbaijani territories in parallel with normalization with Turkey

APA
April 28 2010
Azerbaijan

Washington. Isabel Levine – APA. "The Obama administration’s greatest
mistake in promoting Turkish-Armenian rapprochement was in not pushing
the AKP to be more explicit about whether or not it was really ready to
ratify the protocols without seeing progress on the Nagorno-Karabakh
conflict", -told APA’s US correspondent Dr. Cory Welt, Associate
Director of Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at
the Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington
University in Washington DC.

According to him, if Washington had pushed the AKP, the US might have
understood that tackling the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was still a
precursor to regional stability, not a potential byproduct of it.

Mr. Welt believes that, the United States should clearly reconsider
its approach to Armenia and join Turkey in calling for Yerevan to
pursue a partial withdrawal from Azerbaijani territories in parallel
with normalization with Turkey: "At this point, however, it is
extremely unlikely that it will be successful in the short-term,
since the Armenian government was encouraged to stake its foreign
policy reputation on achieving rapprochement with Turkey with no
preconditions".

In the meantime, he mentioned that, the United States should turn to
repairing its damaged relationship with Azerbaijan while encouraging
Turkey and Armenia to find less dramatic and more incremental ways
to move forward on normalization.