During their campaign, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance both cultivated the Armenian community and promised to right the wrongs inflicted on Armenians during the Biden administration.
Writing on Truth Social on Oct. 23, 2024, Trump pledged, “I will protect persecuted Christians, I will work to stop the violence and ethnic cleansing, and we will restore PEACE between Armenia and Azerbaijan.”
Later that day, Vance echoed this commitment. “The United States should fight against the persecution of Christians all over the world.” Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio also sided with Armenia against external aggression.
The betrayal looming for Armenians may surpass that of the previous administration, which swore that the U.S. would not tolerate ethnic cleansing only to culminate with U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan Mark Libby symbolically celebrating it by participating in an Azerbaijan-sponsored propaganda tour of towns cleansed of their Armenians.
The problem is Russia. Beyond the Baltic States, no country other than Ukraine has pivoted further to the West than Armenia. In the 1990s, as Armenia first sought to detach itself from Russian diplomatic domination, a Russian-backed terrorist attack decapitated the government, killing the reform-minded Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, National Assembly Speaker Karen Demirchyan, two deputy speakers, a minister, and three members of Parliament.
In 2018, Armenians again pivoted away from Russia as protests against Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan’s third term culminated in a popular revolution. One reason Russia betrayed Armenia in the face of Azerbaijani aggression against both Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia proper was the Kremlin’s cynical belief that Armenians would reject the post-2018 order and pivot back to Moscow. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan lost internal support, but Armenians continued to reject the status quo ante. Subsequent assassination and coup plots likewise backfired. Whenever Russia clumsily sought to interfere, the backlash drove a wedge further into Russia-Armenia ties.
Pashinyan, meanwhile, antagonized Russian President Vladimir Putin further, embarrassing him at summits and tilting even further toward Washington.
With Putin poised to seize the initiative and perhaps even win the Ukraine war, Russian power is resurgent. The problem for Armenia is that Putin, as a former KGB agent, has a mindset antagonistic to democracy and holds a grudge. Should Russia consolidate diplomatic, if not territorial, control over Ukraine, the outcome to which the Trump and Vance policies would lead, then pro-Western, democratic Armenia will be in the crosshairs.
Perhaps the spark will be a false flag — the assassination of a Russian diplomat or businessman in Yerevan, for example — or perhaps Putin will dispense with any excuse to make the lesson stark. Either way, Armenians should expect the noose to tighten. Russia will cut off fuel deliveries, freezing Armenians and grinding industry to a halt. Armenian exports into Russia-dominated Georgia will end next. Then, as far as Putin is concerned, it will just be a waiting game until Armenians flee their country or accept Russian domination.
TRUMP’S COMMENTS ABOUT ‘ETHNIC CLEANSING’ LEAVE ARMENIANS ‘CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC’
Perhaps France will help Armenians for a time, but Putin calculates this will be too little too late. If the U.S. is not willing to help the far more strategically significant Ukraine, under what logic would it risk Russian antagonism to help Armenia?
What happens to Ukraine will not end in Ukraine. Trump, Vance, Gabbard, and others said all the right things during the campaign, but the time is now for them to explain whether they were treating Armenian Americans for fools or if they have some unknown or undefined strategy to prevent Armenia from becoming Putin’s idea of Ukraine 2.0.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.