WITH FRIENDS LIKE VLAD...:

Armenia seems to have been taken by surprise, something that is particularly puzzling given its increasingly assertive and belligerent rhetoric against Azerbaijan in the past several years. Why did the conflict not play out the way Armenian leaders imagined? The reason lies in a series of grave miscalculations, whereby Armenia's leadership misread almost everything about this conflict: the broader international environment, the Russian response, Turkey's role in the conflict, as well as the domestic dynamics of their adversary, Azerbaijan.

A deep paradox was always built into the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Armenia has a third of Azerbaijan's population, lacks its natural resources and key geopolitical location. But it won the war in the early 1990s, largely because of two factors: Azerbaijan's internal turmoil and Russian backing for Yerevan. These factors helped Armenia win control over Nagorno-Karabakh as well as much larger territories surrounding that enclave, home to almost 750,000 Azerbaijanis who were forced to flee.

In Armenia, this victory laid the groundwork for a sense of military superiority that lasted until last month. But diplomatically, it soon became clear Armenia had bitten off more than it could chew. In large part because of the nation's tragic history, Armenia had benefited from substantial international goodwill. But Yerevan's territorial advances and ethnic cleansing of Azerbaijanis in 1993-94 changed that perception. By 1996, resolutions in international organizations like the UN and OSCE had made it clear that every other country in the world endorsed the return of all occupied territories to Azerbaijan and a solution to the conflict that would give the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh self-rule but deny them outright independence.

Meanwhile, the sheer scale of the territories Armenia occupied ensured that neither Azerbaijan's leadership nor its society would come to terms with the situation. Instead, a powerful sense of revanchism built in Azerbaijan, and Baku invested a serious portion of the country's windfall oil revenue into the country's military. The growing disparity between the two countries became increasingly untenable: it was like a string that can only be pulled so far without breaking. Armenia responded by deepening its military dependence on Russia, which it saw as a guarantor of its military advances.

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