President Serzh Sargsyan’s failure to go to Lisbon was an additional foreign policy blunder and an involuntary sign that Armenia’s diplomacy has accepted defeat. Acting upset and boycotting the NATO summit will not bring Armenia any diplomatic dividends. The practitioners of Armenia’s foreign policy should have done their best to avoid an unacceptable statement on Nagorno-Karabakh.

Even if that was not possible, President Sargsyan should have gone to the capital of Portugal and used that high forum to raise issues of Armenian concern, just as our two neighbors did.
The draft summit declaration had a rather general formulation for the settlement of conflicts in the South Caucasus, referring to territorial integrity and not to people’s right to self-determination: “The persistence of protracted regional conflicts in South Caucasus and the Republic of Moldova continues to be a matter of great concern for the Alliance. We remain committed in our support of the territorial integrity, independence and sovereignty of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova, and will also continue to support efforts towards a peaceful settlement of these regional conflicts, taking into account these principles.”

Similar formulations unacceptable for Armenia and Norgorno-Karabakh appeared in the past in NATO documents. This fact should have prompted the Armenian authorities to make all effort to at least mitigate that declaration where it referred to conflicts. Yet the practitioners of Armenia’s foreign policy have been congratulating themselves for more than two years on what they consider their biggest achievement in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, that the international community periodically pronounces that all three principles of the Helsinki Final Act should be given an equal importance – territorial integrity, respect for the right of people to self-determination, and refraining from the threat or use of force.

NATO is neither the Organization of the Islamic Conference nor GUAM. Armenian authorities can’t afford to be dismissive of a NATO declaration made on Nagorno-Karabakh. Two important members of NATO – France and the US – are co-chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group. Russia, the third co-chair, was represented at the Lisbon summit by its president. Armenian diplomats, led by President Sargsyan, ought to have been in Lisbon knocking at doors and spending sleepless nights. And if a boycott was the last bullet, then it would have been more appropriate to fire it in Lisbon and not in Yerevan.

Diplomacy can put countries in difficult conditions. But until adopted documents are actually implemented on the ground, the situation is not desperate. A NATO document will not enable anyone to take over Nagorno-Karabakh. But it is high time that Armenia acknowledges its mistakes and attempts to find solutions rather than resort to internal propaganda to conceal each failure.

NATO is the most important and powerful Euro-Atlantic body and an unfavorable document for Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh can serve as a gauge for other Euro-Atlantic institutions, including the OSCE, under whose auspices the Minsk Group framework functions.

The OSCE summit will be held in Astana in one week. There is a risk that an analogous document will be adopted by the OSCE heads of state. In this case Armenia could of course exercise its right of a veto. However things must not deteriorate to the point of a veto, as each veto has a price. It is never late if there is an acknowledgment of the risk, sense of responsibility, and the audacity to accept the mistakes.