South Caucasus realignment
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The South Caucasus realignment is John Kiriakou's assessment of the region following the 2026 Armenian election.

On Armenia he is blunt about the outcome regardless of who forms a government: "Russia has lost Armenia."

Azerbaijan he identifies as the complicating factor, "it's Azerbaijan that's the fly in the ointment", and uses it to correct an intuitive but wrong assumption: "you would think that because Azerbaijan is Muslim and Iran is Muslim and they're bordering each other and there's even an Iranian state called Azerbaijan, you would think that everybody would be able to get along. And that's exactly the opposite of what the truth is. The Azeris are a threat, a minor one, but a threat to Iran. And so the Iranians have far closer relations with the Armenians."

The third moving part is Georgia, which he says has broken from its usual tandem with Armenia: "the Georgians have kind of split off from the Armenians on this issue. And the Georgians are far closer to the Russians now than the Armenians are." His characterisation of the whole: "we're in this period of kind of like diplomatic chaos that we haven't seen since the fall of the Soviet Union." Asked where it started, he answers "it all started with US efforts to expand NATO."

He attaches the same diagnosis to Western strategy generally, agreeing that a neo-containment doctrine still drives foreign-policy and intelligence circles, "Absolutely. 100%.", but noting a change in temperament: from roughly 1946 until 1990 the West was willing to take the long view, "and now the US and the West are not willing to take the long view. They want instant gratification, instant satisfaction. And the world has changed. They're not going to get it."

See also

- Iran regional war (2026)
- Israel, Turkey, and NATO Article 5
