Will the US enter another war, this one in Armenia?

Nikol Pashinyan, Armenia’s Prime Minister, has decided to align Armenia with the United States, maybe also with NATO. Accordingly, he has arranged anti-Russian protests in Yerevan, and carried out military exercises with the United States. It is unlikely the Russians will allow him to make deals with Washington.

Armenia, a country with around three million people, is wedged between Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Iran and Georgia. While Armenia’s historical enemy is Türkiye, in recent years Armenia has been involved in supporting ethnic and religious Christian Armenians living in Nagorno Karabakh.

Armenia has considerable support in the United States, especially due to the Armenian genocide carried out by Türkiye (1894-1896, 1915-1918) that took the lives of 1.5 million Armenians. Almost 400,000 Americans of Armenian descent live in the United States.

Nagorno Karabakh is a landlocked region in the South Caucasus. During Soviet rule it was territorially part of Azerbaijan but Armenia more and more disputed that status. (Both were Soviet states.)

Most of the territory came to be governed by the unrecognized Republic of Artsakh (also known as the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic [NKR]) as a result of the first Nagorno-Karabakh War, which ended in 1994. Armenians have been accused of seeking to purge the region of ethnic Azeris, destroying homes, farms, mosques and even cemeteries, and driving tens of thousands of local Moslems out of the country.