Azerbaijan this week announced a 90-percent hike in defense spending, stoking fears that sooner or later all those guns are going to be put to use.
The $3.1 billion in requested military spending is almost one billion larger than the entire national budget of Azerbaijan’s cash-strapped arch-rival Armenia. Shaken by an economic crisis, Armenia may be hard-pressed to match oil-rich Azerbaijan’s defense spending, but few doubt that Yerevan will try.
“Gunpowder is an agency employed by civilized nations for the settlement of disputes which might become troublesome if left unadjusted,” American writer Ambrose Bierce wrote. Neither guns nor troublesome conflicts are in short supply in the South Caucasus, as the 2008 war between Georgia and Russia displayed. Baku said many times that if Armenia does not surrender the occupied Azerbaijani territories, Azerbaijan will take them by force. Does the increased military spending somehow fit into that option? So far, the answers are few.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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