As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travels to Baku and Yerevan on July 4-5, an old issue will again dominate her discussions: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev will have a wry smile if he watches the media reports. He was the first leader to fail to solve this conflict in 1988. Since his day, the dispute has escalated into full-scale war and then degraded into a miserable deadlock, but its fundamentals have not changed. For years, the broad international consensus is that the competing Armenian and Azeri claims over Nagorno-Karabakh are still so extreme and contradictory that it did not merit a high-level peace initiative. The perception has been that the conflict — halted by a cease-fire but not resolved — is at least being managed and that the risks of a new war are negligible.
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