What was the significance of the NATO Secretary General's visit to the South Caucasus?

The interlocutor of "Detq" is political scientist Davit Harutyunov.

"The last stop of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's regional visit was Yerevan, where he made a number of statements. Observing also the messages of the official in Baku and Tbilisi, what can we say? What was the purpose of the visit and are significant changes expected in the South Caucasus?"

"Those statements were of a standard nature, almost the same messages are said by all representatives of the West, that is, I don't think they are specifically for Yerevan. However, Stoltenberg said almost the same things in Baku and Tbilisi. Actually, the problem was not to solve the issue with those statements, but to try to compete with Russia in this region and increase the influence of the West in general and NATO in particular. But it is not about that some kind of revolutionary changes are expected, because, in fact, all the countries of the region are maneuvering between the West and Russia, maybe Armenia is a little different in this matter. According to me, they were trying to increase the weight of the West and NATO in the South Caucasus within the scope of that maneuver, because all three countries of the region already have some form of cooperation with NATO, and I think they are just trying to increase the weight."

"Recently, Armenia constantly repeats that it wants to diversify its security sector. Does NATO have any interest in participating in that process? For example, we saw that Stoltenberg met with their defense minister in Azerbaijan, but no such meeting took place in Yerevan. How would you interpret this fact?"

"I think that one could not talk about serious guarantees from the beginning, this is due to the fact that even the issue of Georgia's membership, which has set a goal of joining NATO for a long time, is not even on the table at the moment, and there is no mention of any specific dates. And Azerbaijan and Armenia simply do not pose such a problem."

I think that NATO is not ready to provide such guarantees because it is also a potential conflict with Russia. The events of Ukraine have shown that if any of the former Soviet countries comes close to joining NATO, Russia reacts accordingly. That's why, I think, there was no mention of global security guarantees. NATO mainly concentrates its resources on supporting Ukraine, especially in the military-technical sphere, therefore, at most, we could talk about expanding cooperation here.

"In other words, according to you, was the enthusiasm formed in connection with Stoltenberg's visit to Armenia exaggerated?"

If we consider the mere fact of the visit as the basis of that excitement, perhaps we can say that something important happened. However, to say that they reached some important agreements during that visit, it seems not. So I don't see much cause for excitement here. Apart from that, if we look at the statements, the statements about cooperation with Azerbaijan were much more specific and more serious.