Armenia in a Triangle of Great Power Management: Regional competition on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

Abstract

The aim of the article is to examine the foreign policy approaches and interests of three regional powers – Iran, Russia and Turkey before the Second Karabakh war in 2020. The study argues that dissatisfaction with the results of the conflict, forced these countries to further advance their interests in the region through cooperation and regional influence by soft power rather than waging an unpredictable geopolitical confrontation. The study is based on the methods of foreign policy analysis and comparative analysis of political discourse of the three regional powers in application to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict using the Great Power Management (GPM) approach of the English School of International Relations. The study puts forward the idea that the predominance of the national interests of Russia, Turkey and Iran, disguised with ideational concepts in the framework of the GPM is fundamentally different from the principles of multilateralism, driven by the European Union and the West within the liberal paradigm of resolving the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.