By Tigran Grigoryan
On August 2, renowned public intellectual Nassim Nicholas Taleb posted on X that he would not visit Azerbaijan as long as Ruben Vardanyan remains imprisoned in Baku. In his post, Taleb wrote:
“Was asked to go to Azerbaijan for a lecture . I declined (they yuugely upped their offer, not understanding my ethics, thinking it would make a difference).
I will not set foot in Azerbaijan with Reuben Vardanyan jailed there.”
The news quickly spread across the Armenian media landscape, prompting admiration among some segments of Armenian society, while provoking hesitation in certain pro-government circles and leading some to question whether Taleb’s decision was genuinely principled or self-interested.
In my view, the reason Taleb’s post and decision generated such a strong reaction in Armenia is that they stand in stark contrast to both domestic and international trends of recent years.
The defeat in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, as well as the processes that followed—through which Azerbaijan compelled Armenia to accept nearly all of its narratives and positions—have contributed to the fetishization in Armenia of realism, rationality, and pragmatism as guiding principles.
To some extent, this is a natural process, and it contains an element of rethinking previously existing irrational decisions and behavior. Overall, however, the obsession with approaching virtually every issue through a lens of quasi-realism and quasi-rationality has effectively eliminated many moral and principled red lines among senior state officials and various active segments of Armenian society.
The latest manifestation of this approach was the meeting and interview of Armenia’s Ambassador to the United States, Narek Mkrtchyan, with Mike Doran, an expert at the Hudson Institute. Doran is one of Azerbaijan’s most prominent advocates in the West and has for decades been a key figure in anti-Armenian campaigns in the United States. It is also obvious that, in the case of people like Doran, we are not dealing with actors who hold genuine convictions that can be changed through dialogue.
Moreover, even if we set aside the principled dimension of such meetings, their effectiveness and rationality are also highly questionable. In the United States, people like Doran are widely recognized as lobbyists advocating for the interests of a particular country.
An Armenian ambassador’s engagement with such actors under the guise of active and creative diplomacy legitimizes them and increases their credibility. This, in turn, is likely to make the propaganda narratives directed against Armenia by these same actors more effective in the future. And the fact that, even after the Washington summit, Azerbaijan continues to pursue aggressive agendas alongside the peace agenda—agendas in which actors like Doran may also be involved—is evident.
This fetishization of quasi-rationality, however, is not limited to state officials and diplomats. Similar approaches also prevail among various segments of Armenia’s expert community. As part of the broader process of dialogue with representatives of Azerbaijan, it has become increasingly common for Armenian experts to appear in interviews with Azerbaijani media outlets that previously conducted overtly fascistic propaganda campaigns against Armenia and Armenians.
Here, too, the problem is not merely a moral or principled one. In this case as well, the engagement of Armenian experts with such media outlets legitimizes them and makes their propaganda efforts—which are still ongoing—more effective. For example, the newly established Azerbaijani English-language outlet Anewz continues to produce propaganda films about Armenia while also organizing various discussions and interviews featuring Armenian and Azerbaijani experts. In other words, here too, this approach is questionable even from the standpoint of rationality.
These Armenian trends, which are side effects of the defeat in 2020, are compounded by a prevailing approach in international relations: transactional foreign policy. Against the backdrop of major regional wars and the resulting energy-related challenges, all major actors have either abandoned or relegated to the background foreign policies based on values and principles. The fact that Azerbaijan, despite all of its domestic problems, continues to be regarded as a reliable partner by all major international actors is a vivid manifestation of these trends.
The abandonment of values- and principles-based policymaking by state actors does not mean that non-state actors should adopt the same behavior. On the contrary, this gap should be filled precisely by independent actors, who have neither the obligation nor the need to demonstrate hyper-rational and hyper-pragmatic approaches on every issue.
In this regard, Taleb’s decision—and his decision to make it public—should serve as a signal to both Armenian and other non-state actors working on the region that even in an era of hyper-pragmatism and transactionalism, there can still be room for principled choices.
The Op-Ed was originally published on CivilNet.