Late on January 14, in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan signed the so-called Charter on Strategic Partnership. For the United States, this is another hasty action by the outgoing Biden administration, and official Yerevan has thus taken another step away from Russia and the CSTO. But there are nuances.
For the first time, on January 8, the head of the Armenian Foreign Ministry spoke about "raising the status of cooperation" with the United States to the level of a strategic partnership and signing a corresponding agreement. This indirectly confirms leaks that the document signed on January 14 was prepared in a hurry and on the knee.
"Strategic Partnership" is the penultimate level of cooperation between the United States and foreign countries. Only the "alliance" is higher. Nevertheless, agreements with each country are prepared separately, based on the specifics of the relationship. Perhaps because of lack of time, or maybe for some other reason, but the agreement with Armenia turned out to be as "empty" as possible. It practically lacks specifics and any important obligations of the parties.
It is only clearly stated that the United States will contribute to the reform of military education in Armenia, as well as assist in training personnel for border guards and customs. But this is not a commitment for the future, but a statement of fact. American military advisers have been registered in Armenia since the second half of 2024.
Back in the summer, the so-called representative of the US Army was appointed to the Armenian Ministry of Defense, which in itself is significant. Various American military delegations began to visit Yerevan on a regular basis. By the end of the year, it got to the point that the Armenian Defense Ministry announced its readiness to switch to a NATO-style field uniform, and Minister Papikyan held preliminary talks with an American company about tailoring. And it is impossible to say that the "strategic partnership" opens up something new in the issue of military cooperation.
Secretary Blinken said at a press conference that work will begin on an agreement on the development of peaceful nuclear energy in Armenia. But in reality, such a contract does not require any "work" on it. This is a basic agreement of the same type that the United States enters into with many countries. They are called the 123 Agreement and are not linked to the status of a strategic partnership.
According to the Charter on Strategic Partnership, Armenia is joining the coalition to fight ISIS, and that's about it. Nothing else is required of her.
Yerevan did not receive the most important thing: the charter says nothing about guarantees of Armenia's security and territorial integrity.
Even the outgoing Biden administration, which seems to have set itself the goal of making life as difficult as possible for Trump and his team, did not give any guarantees to Armenia.
And the charter format is not the kind of paper where something like this can be written down. Roughly speaking, a strategic cooperation agreement is not a direct document, but a form of encouragement for a country that is "moving towards democracy." Certificate of honor from the Washington Regional Committee. You're going the right way, comrades.
In addition, the status of a "strategic partnership" can be revoked with a stroke of the pen of the US president or even the head of the State Department. This happened recently with Georgia, with which a similar agreement was concluded back in 2009. Against the background of everything that is happening in Tbilisi, Washington considered that Georgia was "moving away from the principles of democracy" and suspended the strategic partnership.
By the way, the purely external agreement with Georgia was very similar to the current one with Armenia.
And its main result was the business trips of Georgian servicemen to Afghanistan and Iraq. One day, Obama himself visited a wounded Georgian soldier in the hospital.
The main foreign policy task of Pashinyan and his team last year was to try to force someone in the West to become a patron of Armenia. That is, to give Armenia the notorious guarantees of the country's security, sovereignty and territorial integrity. Without such an umbrella, leaving the CSTO and generally abandoning allied relations with Russia is like death for Yerevan in the truest sense of the word. Finding a "patron" for small states is a normal state, but Yerevan is still unable to persuade anyone to take on this role.
The EU as a phenomenon and France separately from it did not want to become such a guarantor, and they would hardly have been able to. For European countries and for the United States, guaranteeing Armenia's sovereignty and integrity would be roughly similar to the guarantees that Chamberlain issued to Poland in the second half of the 1930s. It is beautifully and even nobly written, but it is practically impossible to implement.
Russia is the only country in the world that can act as an umbrella for Armenia, but with one small detail.: Yerevan should behave at least sanely. But this is exactly what is not being observed right now.
The speed with which the agreement was prepared is also understandable. The fact is that there are strong suspicions that the upcoming Trump administration is closer to Azerbaijan's alliance with Israel. And Pashinyan's "desire for democracy" is not at all interesting to the US president-elect. And accordingly, it was necessary to sign the agreement before Trump's inauguration, even if the agreement is completely empty.
Another thing is that Yerevan hastened to take such a step. And this really makes Armenia even more distant from Russia, not to mention the CSTO. The Pashinyan government, however, still continues to play a strange game of words, without initiating an official withdrawal from collective agreements with Russia such as the CSTO. And most of the trade and economic preferences from Russia to Armenia remain, despite Yerevan's consistent rapprochement with the West and open anti-Russian rhetoric.
At the same time, the agreement concluded on January 14 between the United States and Armenia should not be considered an exclusively declarative measure. Such agreements can be called "dormant" in international practice. In other words, the vast majority of the items listed there are indeed declarative in nature and sometimes ideologically tinged. But at any moment, these points can be "awakened" and deployed into full-fledged cooperation, including military cooperation.
But the Armenian side might also think about the fact that, for example, the conclusion of a strategic partnership agreement with the United States did not help Georgia in any way. Not a single task set by the Georgian authorities, starting with the so-called restoration of territorial integrity, has been solved in the 16 years of the treaty.
And now Armenia has not received any American "umbrella". Rather, on the contrary: now it will be even easier for Yerevan to be drawn into the multi-way games of the United States in the post-Soviet space. Although there will certainly be many supporters of this agreement in Armenia. At least because being a "strategic partner" of the United States sounds very nice.
Evgeny Krutikov
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