Armenia’s pursuit of an irredentist claim to Nagorno-Karabakh has long trapped it as a Russian client state. Nikol Pashinyan has chosen a different path.

Conventional wisdom holds that a country guards its independence by holding its ground, and that to surrender a claim to a part of its imagined territory, even one outside its control, is to surrender a part of its sovereignty. This attitude helps to explain the dozens of ongoing territorial disputes across the world—Venezuela’s desire for the Essequibo region of Guyana, dueling Indian and Pakistani claims to Kashmir, and the controversy around China’s “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, among others—and why they are so intractable.

Armenia is no stranger to this view. For decades, it vigorously defended its claim to the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally-recognized territory of Azerbaijan. Even after the enclave, known as the Republic of Artsakh, fell to an Azerbaijani offensive in 2023, Armenian politicians railed against Azerbaijan and vowed to liberate the territory from Baku’s control in a future conflict.

But this attitude has its limits. After Armenia lost the war, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan recognized that for Armenia—a small state wedged between far larger powers—an unwinnable claim could also become the mechanism by which his nation’s sovereignty was lost, and sought to win long-term peace in the south Caucasus by giving up Armenia’s claim to Nagorno-Karabakh. The deeper meaning of Pashinyan’s reelection on June 7 is a vote of confidence from the Armenian people in this approach—and a reward for Pashinyan’s remarkable personal courage in pursuing it.

How Irredentism Traps Nations

Sovereignty is rarely lost when a small nation reaches for a larger foreign patron. More often, the process plays out in reverse: the patron detects a useful grievance held by a smaller power and approaches it, playing on its hatreds and promising it the arms, money, and protection that make an unwinnable fight feel winnable.

The sponsor’s interest, however, is in the conflict itself, not its resolution. A frozen grievance is a dependable instrument of control. The client soon can no longer make peace without the patron’s permission; it cannot run an independent foreign policy; it cannot even picture a future not organized around the lost land. To further a claim it will never make good on, it must accept a dependency it cannot break.

Armenia was trapped inside such a claim for a generation. Its war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh began in the late 1980s, during the final days of the Soviet Union, and killed tens of thousands of Armenians and Azerbaijanis before its final resolution. To hold the territory against a larger, wealthier, and militarily stronger neighbor, Yerevan mortgaged itself to Moscow, which was only too happy to keep both Armenia and Azerbaijan tethered to Russian goodwill by keeping their quarrel alive. As a result, Armenia spent decades as a poor, corrupt, and strategically captive Russian client state. The very thing it was fighting to prove—that it was a sovereign nation—became a casualty of the fight.

For Armenians, this is an old pattern. Long before Moscow weaponized Karabakh, the Russian Empire and France each cultivated Armenian national aspirations as a lever against the Ottoman Empire—Russia casting itself as protector of Christianity in the Near East, France arming and encouraging the Armenians of Cilicia during and after World War I. In each case, the great power nurtured the hopes and aspirations of a stateless people, so long as those hopes served its own interests—then walked away when they did not, leaving the Armenians to face the terrible consequences alone.

How Nikol Pashinyan Changed Armenia’s Path

Pashinyan did not start out as a skeptic of Armenia’s relationship with Russia. When the 2018 Velvet Revolution carried him to power, he defended the claim to Karabakh as ardently as the men he replaced. What ultimately broke the spell was the 2020 war, which stripped away three-quarters of the Armenian-held territory in six weeks—and laid bare how little Russian patronage was worth when it counted.

In the years that followed, Pashinyan came to believe that the pursuit of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, not Armenia’s defeat, was the problem. As long as Yerevan defined itself by land it could not keep, it would remain the ward of whatever great power would help it pretend otherwise. Letting the claim go was not surrendering its sovereignty, but the first step toward its recovery. 

Pashinyan took that step at a staggering personal cost. He signed away the occupied districts, formally recognized Azerbaijani sovereignty over the region, and absorbed the rage that followed when Baku retook the enclave in 2023 and its Armenian residents fled. He was branded a traitor; the Russia-linked Apostolic Church and a Moscow-funded opposition mobilized to bring him down. Yet Armenians returned him to office anyway on June 7—not because the loss had stopped hurting, but because a majority had reached the conclusion that the alternative to peace was a future mortgaged permanently to another nation’s interests. 

Armenia Is Doing What Palestine Won’t

The Palestinian movement sits in the identical trap and keeps making the identical wrong choice. Its claim to all of historic Palestine is no more feasible than Armenia’s claim to Karabakh, and clinging to it has carried the same price: a people kept perpetually mobilized, perpetually dependent, and perpetually useful to sponsors, Iran foremost among them. Tehran professes to care for the suffering of the Palestinian people, yet it has done virtually nothing to alleviate that suffering; it has not helped to build a viable Palestinian state, improved the capacity of the Palestinian Authority to govern, or invested in development efforts in the West Bank and Gaza. Its strategic interest lies in the continuation of the struggle, rather than in any Palestinian state being built. Palestinian grievance is the asset, and Iran can be counted on to oppose any resolution of the grievance, even one that would benefit the Palestinian people.

The cost of that approach is on display right now. The American-brokered agreement that paused the Gaza war in late 2025 has stalled—not over borders or aid, but over Hamas’ refusal to disarm and give up on its farcical desire to wipe Israel off the map. A temporary ceasefire can be signed, but a true peace cannot be reached while one party’s identity still rests on the other’s destruction.

Armenia is doing the unglamorous and unpopular work that actually ends conflicts. Its constitution still reaches, through a preamble that invokes a 1989 act calling for the “reunification” of Armenia with Karabakh, toward a claim on territory the world recognizes as Azerbaijani, and Baku has made clear there can be no settled peace while a neighbor’s founding charter lays claim to its land.

Pashinyan is moving to remove that language. Armenia’s constitutional court has ruled that this cannot be accomplished by simple amendment, but only by adopting an entirely new constitution, approved in a national referendum. This is a politically perilous undertaking, and the vote, expected around 2027, is no sure thing. But it is the institutional form of the choice he made after 2020—the act that turns one leader’s decision into a country’s commitment, so the peace rests on the Armenian state rather than on a single exposed prime minister. The Palestinian leadership has spent thirty years dodging the equivalent step, and that dodge is why the conflict outlives every truce. 

None of this requires pretending that Armenia’s defeat is painless, or that it is fair. It is neither. What Armenia is demonstrating is narrower and far harder won: that for a small nation, sovereignty is not measured by the claims it refuses to abandon, but by its freedom to choose its own future. This freedom begins the moment it stops letting a lost cause be owned by someone else. Pashinyan understood that the only way to peace and sovereignty was to set down the one thing he had always been told he must never release. Swallowing defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh will be bitter for the Armenians. But Armenia will survive it, and it will emerge a better, stronger, and freer nation on the other end.

About the Author: Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, an expert at the N7 Foundation, and a research fellow at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University. He also sits on the advisory board of the Alekain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing education to women and girls in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. He specializes in Eurasia and the Middle East, and his work has been featured in various outlets such as Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, the Atlantic Council, Novaya Gazeta, RFE/RL, Foreign Policy, and others.

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