Alec Yenikomshian
The rapid dismantling of Kurdish autonomy in northeast Syria is not a distant episode for Armenia, but a strategically proximate warning. What unfolded there over a matter of days—the abrupt end of a political and military reality that had lasted more than a decade—offers a compressed lesson in how power now operates in a post-hegemonic international order –where world hegemons do not exist and regional powers are more assertive, and how small, exposed actors are treated when regional and global interests realign.
What happened in Northeast Syria?
For more than ten years, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) controlled large swathes of northeast Syria. This autonomy emerged under exceptional circumstances: state collapse, civil war, and the rise of ISIS. The United States armed, trained, and politically shielded the Kurds not out of commitment to Kurdish self-rule, but because they were the most effective local instrument for defeating ISIS. Kurdish autonomy was thus real, durable, and costly to dismantle—but it was also conditional.
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Its sudden collapse was not caused by a single military defeat, but by a convergence of decisions. Turkey, long opposed to any Kurdish quasi-state on its border, moved decisively once it became clear that Washington would not escalate. Damascus, backed indirectly by regional acquiescence, reasserted authority. And the United States, while still militarily present in the region, chose not to enforce the political outcome it had once enabled.
This was neither conspiracy nor betrayal by accident. It reflected a shift in U.S. policy that had been years in the making. Washington is still powerful, but increasingly selective. It preserves leverage for higher-order priorities, sacrifices secondary instruments, and no longer enforces outcomes everywhere. The Kurds were tactically indispensable, but strategically expendable—victims of changing cost–benefit calculations rather than diplomatic treachery.
The relevance for Armenia
What is being witnessed is a coordinated but loose convergence of interests under declining hegemonic discipline: In geographical areas which are not of the highest priority for the global powers, regional powers act first, global ones decide which losses to absorb. This is how post-hegemonic systems behave.
The relevance for Armenia is immediate. The South Caucasus today is exactly the kind of theatre where these dynamics play out with maximum asymmetry.
In such systems, great powers do not defend clients unless a core interest is at stake. Norms and guarantees are conditional and revocable. Losses are managed rather than prevented. Since 2020, the South Caucasus has conformed to this logic with growing clarity.
Regionally, the decisive force is the Turkey–Azerbaijan axis, which now functions as a single strategic complex. It is revisionist, offensive, and time-advantaged, pursuing corridor logic, military integration, and geopolitical continuity. In this respect, Turkey’s role in the Caucasus mirrors its role in northern Syria.
Russia, meanwhile, is no longer a protector but a declining arbiter. It has not betrayed Armenia by choice; it has reprioritized under constraint. Lacking escalation bandwidth and unwilling to confront Turkey directly except over existential stakes, Moscow tolerates unfavorable outcomes in order to preserve residual influence at lower cost—just as it did in Syria.
Iran remains present but cautious: a balancer rather than a guarantor. It opposes Turkish corridor projects in principle, yet avoids confrontation unless its own red lines—territorial integrity or access routes—are crossed.
As for the West, the parallel with Syria is most direct. The United States and the EU engage rhetorically, fund reforms, and promote “connectivity,” but avoid coercive enforcement. Just as Washington did not fight for Kurdish autonomy once its utility declined, it will not fight for Armenia’s hard security interests against the Turkey–Azerbaijan axis. This is not hostility; it is hierarchical indifference.
Within this structure, Armenia’s position is uncomfortable but clear. Armenia today resembles the Syrian Kurds after ISIS: normatively appealing, strategically useful in discourse, militarily isolated, and structurally expendable as a decision-making subject. Armenia is not a core interest for any great power—not the U.S., not the EU, not Russia, and not even Iran. This does not mean Armenia is irrelevant; it means it is not worth war for others.
As a result, Armenia is being pushed toward “managed reintegration”: normalization with Turkey and Azerbaijan, connectivity, unblocking communications, peace treaties under constraint. These are not neutral processes. They are mechanisms through which stronger regional actors formalize gains while great powers legitimize outcomes they chose not to prevent.
Lessons for Armenia
Syunik occupies in this equation the same structural position that northeast Syria once did. It is strategically central, constantly discussed, and militarily vulnerable. But crucially, it is also the locus through which Armenia itself becomes diplomatically abstracted. Most external actors prefer stability, transit, and predictability over maximal Armenian sovereignty there—just as Kurdish autonomy conflicted with regional preferences in Syria.
Initiatives such as TRIPP should be understood within this logic: as instruments through which a post-hegemonic order seeks to regularize outcomes it is unwilling to enforce or reverse.
The lesson is stark. Armenia cannot rely on guarantees, expect intervention, freeze the status quo, or out-ally regional powers. Any strategy built on these assumptions will fail. What Armenia can do with regard to the aims of the regional aggressive power is narrower but not negligible: raise the local cost of coercion, complicate timelines, introduce uncertainty, and thereby prevent rapid consolidation and clean legitimization of imposed outcomes.
This does not mean chaos or rejection of order. It means denying predictability to those who rely on speed, fait accompli, and external acquiescence. Armenia must avoid being framed as an obstacle to stability, while also refusing to become a passive object of “order” defined by others.
Armenia must frame itself as indispensable to stability, unavoidable in transit, and costly to bypass. Here lies its challenge. It should exploit rivalries without choosing illusions. In a post-hegemonic world, illusions kill faster than enemies.
Armenia should balance:
– Iran vs Turkey,
– Russia vs Turkey,
– the West vs exclusivist corridor logic,
—but without expecting protection.
When great powers stop enforcing outcomes, regional powers decide. And when regional powers decide, smaller actors endure only through strategic realism. The Syrian Kurds lost not because they were wrong, but because their protection was conditional. Armenia now faces the same structural conditions. Sovereignty is not doomed—but it will be narrow, negotiated, and hard-won.
