Georgia and Azerbaijan have been publicly cooperating a lot lately, with presidential meetings and news of co-producing military jets and armored personnel carriers. That military cooperation, in particular, is projected to grow, writes Azerbaijani analyst Zaur Shiriyev. In a two-part series in Today's Zaman, Shiriyev looks at some of the details of the increasing cooperation, in particular in the military-industrial sphere. Shiriyev traces the increased cooperation to the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia:
[S]ince 2008, new opportunities have arisen. Prior to 2008, Baku had long demanded that Tbilisi stop letting Armenia repair its battle tanks and other armored techniques at a Russian munitions factory in Tbilisi. Once Georgia cut ties with Moscow and agreed, high level ministry of defense visits from Azerbaijan to Georgia commenced and both sides reached a compromise. This stimulated the development of their defense industry cooperation.
Shiriyev doesn't mention the political component of this, but it's certainly also the case that shifts in geopolitics have helped. This is particularly true with respect to both countries' relations to Russia and the West. Until recently, at least, Georgia's foreign policy could be described as 100 percent oriented toward the West, Armenia's as maybe 90 percent toward Russia, and Azerbaijan's as roughly balanced. That has caused problems for Georgia, in the form of the 2008 war, and for Armenia, in the form of its continued isolation. (Yes, the latter has more to do with its conflicts with Azerbaijan and Turkey, but a Western geopolitical orientation certainly would have helped to extract Armenia from that situation.) My EurasiaNet colleague Giorgi Lomsadze suggests that it's in fact Armenia who has been doing the best balancing act, and things could be moving that way, but I would still argue that until now Azerbaijan has best been able to chart its own path. (Of course having lots of resources that other countries want makes that job easier.)
Anyway, this has been changing a bit. The election of Bidzina Ivanishvili as prime minister has prompted a tentative thawing of Georgia's relations with Russia. Meanwhile, Baku's ties with Russia have suffered. That has moved Georgia and Azerbaijan into somewhat more comparable positions.
So where is all this going? Reliance on one another (as well as Turkey, a point Shiriyev expands on in his piece) for military equipment would allow Georgia and Azerbaijan to both become less dependent (both militarily and politically) on both the West and Russia. As if things weren't already geopolitically complicated in the South Caucasus, seems like they're getting even more so.
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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