The Armenian nation stands today at the edge of an abyss, facing the very real possibility of extinction. This is not rhetorical exaggeration. What lies just over the horizon in the South Caucasus is another long, expensive conflict that will only materially end in the death of more Christians.

So what’s going on in Armenia, and how is it relevant to larger regional and international current events?

Armenia’s survival is not simply a moral question. It is a test of whether America retains any coherent strategy to shape the balance of power.

A suicidal regime

Since the disastrous 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh, the government of Nikol Pashinyan has systematically dismantled every safeguard that once protected the Armenian people from foreign conquest and internal tyranny. In that war, Pashinyan presided over catastrophic military failures and rushed to surrender swaths of historic Armenian territory, granting major concessions that emboldened Azerbaijan’s ambitions and left hundreds of thousands of Armenians displaced and defenseless.

Those concessions proved to be only the beginning. In 2023, the world watched with a shrug as Azerbaijan, with open material backing from Israel and tacit approval from the United States, completed the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, an ancient Armenian homeland populated by a Christian people whose roots in that soil predate any current Islamic inhabitants by centuries. 120,000 Armenians were forced to leave their homeland, as the Biden administration stuck its head in the sand.

A slap in the face

Today, the Pashinyan regime has shifted its focus inward. He’s not simply failing to defend Armenian sovereignty; he has actively antagonized it. Having sold off Armenia’s territorial integrity, Pashinyan and his cohorts are now targeting the last resilient pillars of Armenian identity: the Armenian Apostolic Church, the memory of the Armenian genocide, and the business leaders capable of sustaining national resistance.

In recent months, senior officials have publicly questioned the historicity of the Armenian genocide, a giant slap in the face to every Armenian who carries the memory of 1.5 million murdered ancestors. They have couched their transparent Turkophilia in euphemisms like “normalizing relations,” as if the only obstacle to peace were Armenian nationalism rather than Turkish ambition.

Most recently, in a move that should alarm every serious observer, Pashinyan met with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, only to return home and unleash an unprecedented wave of repression against the Armenian Church and civil society. Armenian authorities have brazenly arrested clergy members, harassed Church institutions, and launched politically motivated prosecutions against billionaire businessmen like Samvel Karapetyan.

Pashinyan’s campaign of intimidation is no accident. It is a coordinated attempt, in collaboration with the Turkish and Azeri governments, to complete the total disenfranchisement of the Armenian people and make room for the ambitions of bigger regional powers.

It’s all very Zelenskyy-esque.

A forgotten American commitment

To understand the situation developing in the South Caucasus and the Middle East more effectively, we need to take a step back and look at the historical context (we always need to look at the historical context).

Once upon a time, the establishment of Armenian sovereignty was not just an abstract cause or a footnote to European diplomacy. It was an explicitly declared American interest, recognized in the highest acts of U.S. foreign policy.

In the aftermath of the First World War and the Armenian genocide, President Woodrow Wilson advanced a proposal for an independent Armenian republic, not merely as an act of moral redress, but as a strategic effort to reshape the post-Ottoman order in America’s favor.

Unlike the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which carved up Ottoman lands for British and French imperial gain, Wilson’s proposal sought to establish Armenia as a stable, pro-Western buffer state at the crossroads of Russian, Turkish, British, and Persian spheres of influence. His decision reflected a clear understanding: Without a sovereign Armenian state anchoring the region, the vacuum would be filled by rival empires.

A Greater Armenia, with secure borders and access to the Black Sea, would serve American interests by containing Bolshevik expansion from the north, checking pan-Turkic irredentism from the west, and limiting European colonial dominance from the south. It was a deliberate assertion of American influence in an increasingly competitive Eurasian theater.

Bettman/Getty Images

Wilson's vision

This commitment took concrete form on November 22, 1920, when President Wilson signed the Arbitral Award of the President of the United States of America, formally delineating the frontiers of an Armenian homeland. Wilson’s award assigned to Armenia the provinces of Erzurum, Trebizond, Van, and Bitlis, along with a vital corridor to the Black Sea, territories that had formed the historic heart of the Armenian nation for millennia.

This was not a symbolic declaration. It was a legally binding arbitral decision rendered by the United States’ presidential office, independent of the unratified Treaty of Sèvres.

Yuval Mozes/r/imaginarymaps

Which means that even a century ago, America recognized that a sovereign Armenia served several crucial functions:

• A strategic counterweight to regional hegemons.
• A test case of American credibility.
• A potential logistical hub in Eurasian trade.

Yet over the decades, as the world has descended into new conflicts, the White House’s commitment to Armenia has been quietly set aside. No treaty ever formally annulled the arbitral award (the Treaty of Lausanne superseded the Treaty of Sevres but did not explicitly nullify the Wilsonian arbitral award). No president ever renounced it. It simply disappeared from American memory.

The failure to enforce the award led directly to Armenia’s dismemberment and signaled America’s unwillingness to project power in Eurasia. And in that vacuum, Turkey and its allies have pursued the total subjugation of Armenia.

However, all this is to say is that since America’s push for a sovereign Greater Armenia was driven by strategic interests back then, its memory provides a precedent for realist engagement now.

Armenia as strategic imperative

It would be easy to dismiss Wilson’s arbitral award as an artifact of a vanished world. But doing so ignores the reality that the threats Wilson identified a century ago have not only returned; they’ve only compounded in complex layers of sophistication and danger.

The South Caucasus is not an irrelevant frontier. Especially now, with Iran, Israel, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Azerbaijan all jockeying for geopolitical position, it is the epicenter of a new contest among regional powers.

Therefore, Armenia’s survival is not simply a moral question. It is a test of whether America retains any coherent strategy to shape the balance of power. Historical precedents set a century ago and current developments are now converging to create an imperative for renewed, interest-based American engagement.

Consider first the project of pan-Turanism, the ideology that envisions a unified Turkic world stretching from Anatolia to Central Asia, with Armenia standing inconveniently in the middle.

In the past decade, Turkey President Erdogan and Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev have made no secret of their ambition to dissolve Armenia’s independence once and for all. The conquest of Artsakh was not the endpoint of that campaign. It was just the beginning.

With every concession forced from Yerevan, Ankara and Baku grow bolder in their conviction that the entire Armenian state can be reduced to an even tinier vassal, stripped of all allies, and forced to “normalize relations” on Turkish terms.

Iran and Israel

Iran’s position, meanwhile, seeks to deter full encirclement by the Turkic states, Israel, and the U.S. Iran wants Armenia intact enough to buffer against Turkey and Israel, but not strong enough to become a Western base. This explains why Iran has:

1. Denounced Azerbaijani claims that Armenia is “Western Azerbaijan.”
2. Have reported that Israel is using Azerbaijan as a base of operations to launch drones into Iran.

Israel’s role is obvious. It is seeking to surveil, strike, and destabilize Iran and, therefore, will leverage its alliance with Azerbaijan to do so. Armenia’s impending destruction is collateral damage in Israel’s rivalry with Iran.

The United States, meanwhile, has sought to complicate Russian and Iranian corridors and maintain influence, which is why the U.S. has recently proposed an American-run transit corridor through Syunik (that it would take control of under a 100-year lease), signaling support for the Pashinyan regime’s “normalization” efforts with Turkey and Azerbaijan.

American engagement in the region is transactional and ambivalent rather than principled. It tolerates Israel’s arming of Azerbaijan and prioritizes the logistics of the Zangezur corridor over Armenian sovereignty.

Because all major powers see Armenia as an instrument and not an end in itself, Armenia’s position becomes uniquely precarious and subject to external manipulation and, therefore, extermination.

Yes, extermination.

RELATED: Archaeologists discover one of the world's oldest Christian churches in history's first Christian country

kosmos111 via iStock/Getty Images

Perpetual hostage

As it stands right now, Armenia is the perpetual hostage of both rival empires and its own corrupt government. One could even say the pan-Turanic empire is complete, as Turkey, Azerbaijan, and the Pashinyan-led Armenia are all aligned in their pursuit of Turkic interests, with the only obstacle standing in the way being the Armenian people and Church.

And with Pashinyan getting set to sign a “peace deal” that would hand over the Zangezur corridor running through the south of Armenian territory to the Turks and Azeris, the very survival of the Armenian people is at stake.

Anadolu/Getty Images

A threat to Christendom

Yet beyond these calculations of pipelines, corridors, and spheres of influence lies something deeper. Amenia is the world’s first Christian nation. Its survival is not simply an Armenian concern. It is a civilizational concern.

The same forces that destroyed the ancient Christian communities of Northern Syria and Iraq are now setting their sights on the Caucasus. If they succeed, the precedent will be clear: Any Christian culture that stands in the path of Turkish, Islamist, or Israeli ambitions will be erased, and the United States will do nothing.

And just for the record, this is not an abstract appeal to policy. It is a reminder of a promise personally made. Days before the 2024 election, Donald Trump spoke by phone with his holiness Aram I, catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia, to discuss the crisis in Artsakh and the plight of Armenian prisoners of war. This came weeks after a post on Truth Social clarifying what was at stake:

— (@)

Today, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Karekin II, faces the threat of intimidation and possible arrest by the Pashinyan regime, a traitorous act that should be recognized for what it is: the criminalization of the faith at the heart of Armenian identity.

Clarity and action

If President Trump still stands by his pledge to defend Christian communities in the Middle East, then this moment demands clarity and action. It’s not enough to speak of solidarity when the lights and cameras are on and then remain silent as the last Christian enclaves are dismantled. And any “peace deal” that tolerates Pashinyan’s continued abuse against the Church and the people is no peace deal at all.

A sensible foreign policy in the region would both protect American interests and defend Christendom from Islamic encroachment. What would this look like in the near term? Here are the steps I would suggest.

1. Recommit to the spirit of the Wilsonian award.

No policy will succeed if it begins from the premise that Armenia must accept perpetual subjugation. The U.S. should officially acknowledge that the Wilsonian arbitral award remains a foundational expression of America’s interest in an independent and territorially secure Armenia. This does not mean an immediate redrawing of borders, but it does mean recognizing that Turkey’s historic ambitions to dominate the South Caucasus have been historically incompatible with U.S. interests.

2. Establish clear red lines for Turkish and Azerbaijani aggression.

The Biden administration’s passivity has emboldened Turkey and Azerbaijan. Trump’s administration must reverse this. Washington should communicate unequivocally that any further attacks on Armenian territory, whether in Syunik, Tavush, or any other region, will trigger targeted sanctions on Turkish and Azerbaijani defense sectors, including the suspension of U.S. military assistance and the freezing of assets linked to senior officials. America did it with Russia at the onset of the Ukraine conflict without hesitation. This should be a no-brainer.

3. Sanction those who persecute the Armenian Church.

In the Global Magnitsky Act, the U.S. has an effective tool to hold human rights violators accountable. Pashinyan and other Armenian officials involved in the arbitrary detention of clergy and the harassment of religious institutions should face immediate personal sanctions: visa bans, asset freezes, and public condemnation.

4. End the pretense of “normalization” without accountability.

It is not normalization when one side holds the knife and the other is forced to surrender everything that makes it a nation. Any U.S. support for Turkish-Armenian rapprochement must be conditioned on verifiable commitments: the recognition of the Armenian genocide, the return of prisoners of war, and the cessation of territorial encroachments.

5. Get tough on Israel.

This commitment also requires the courage to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Chief among them is that Israel, a state Trump rightly defended as an ally, has played a decisive role in arming Azerbaijan’s aggression. No serious policy to protect Armenia can ignore this contradiction. If America is willing to tolerate the sale of drones and missiles to a regime that ethnically cleansed Artsakh, then any pledge to defend Christian heritage rings hollow.