Armenia and Azerbaijan’s FMs to meet individually with Pompeo
The Armenian and Azerbaijani foreign ministers will meet separately today with United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington, D.C.
The meetings are the latest developments in the ongoing Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which has seen two failed Russia-backed ceasefires in the past month.
The inability of both sides to maintain a ceasefire continues to cast doubt on the Organization for security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Minsk Group’s ability to successfully mediate a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The US, acting as a mediator alongside France and Russia, faces a complicated set of challenges in accounting for the importance of Azerbaijan and Turkey relations and an increasingly vocal US-Armenian diaspora. While President Trump has remained silent on the crisis, Secretary Pompeo called for a ceasefire last week and appeared to endorse Armenia during a radio interview.
Expect the US led meetings to be unsuccessful. The OSCE Minsk Group has spent 30-years trying to mediate a solution to on-and-off conflict to no avail. The already difficult process of gaining a consensus from both belligerents and all international parties will be further compounded by a distracted end-of-term US administration. Instead, expect hostilities to continue increasing as the OSCE Minsk Group continues to bring Baku and Yerevan together.
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