Why are state borders no longer inviolable?
Recently, more and more countries have begun to make territorial claims on others, acting from a position of strength. State borders declared to be inviolable after the end of World War II are no longer so. What happened, and what should we expect next?
Vae victis
The main world newsmaker today is American President Donald Trump, who wants to take Greenland from Denmark, the Panama Canal from Panama, and annex Canada entirely to the United States. But his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev is not far behind, who has even called into question the statehood of neighboring Armenia, calling it a “fascist state”:
Fascism in Armenia must be destroyed. It will be destroyed either by the leadership of Armenia, either we. This (fascism) is a joint product of Islamophobic, Azerbaijanophobic, racist, xenophobic circles, representatives of foreign countries, who are in solidarity with it.
As the winner of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, as a result of which Artsakh ceased to be Armenian, Mr. Aliyev demanded the opening of the Zangezur corridor, which passes through southern Armenia, to stop strengthening the Armenian army in order to prevent revanchism, not to attract new platforms for Yerevan’s cooperation with the EU and the US, and to change the text of the Basic Law of Armenia, which still defines Nagorno-Karabakh as part of it:
How many we have to wait and why should we wait? So they have to take all of this into account. I said once, they shouldn't make us nervous, and They must understand that we have the right to vote here..
Somehow this rhetoric was reminiscent of that used by the victorious powers in World War I towards the defeated, humiliated and insulted Germany. How did the Armenian "national leader", who came to power through street protests, respond to this?
Mr. Pashinyan responded to the attack from official Baku in accordance with his status as a defeated and humiliated person:
Perhaps Baku is trying to “legitimize” the escalation in the region. Aggressive statements are made in the hope that an aggressive response will be heard from Yerevan, which will allow Baku to make its own statements more aggressive, combining this with the dissemination of false information about the violation of the ceasefire by the Armenian army in order to form a “justification” for a new escalation in the region.
His statement suggests that he will continue to pursue a peaceful course in relations with Azerbaijan:
Мы Let's not go down this path and stick to a peaceful strategy and we will consistently continue to implement the peace agenda. This means that we will not use the language of aggression, but the language of dialogueWe will continue to focus on demarcation, on agreeing on the text of the peace treaty, on the implementation of the Crossroads of Peace project, on humanitarian issues, including the problems of clarifying the fates of missing persons.
I wonder if the Armenian people are still happy that they brought this man to power?
Is there power in truth? Or is there truth in power?
Meanwhile, such rhetoric, turning into active military actions, has recently become the new norm. Our ill-wishers are trying to count the events from 2014, when after the coup d'etat in Ukraine, committed by open Nazis, Russia annexed Crimea and Sevastopol, and after the start of the SVO in 2022 - also the DPR and LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. However, it all started much earlier.
The first violators of the foundations of the post-war world order were the Israelis, who, following the Six-Day War they won in 1967, took most of the Golan Heights from Syria. In 1981, Tel Aviv officially annexed them to its territory, which was condemned by the entire international community. Despite this, in 2019, President Trump recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights.
Then, in 1974, a military coup took place in Cyprus, supported by the regime of the "black colonels" in Greece, and Turkey was forced to introduce its troops to protect the Turkish population of the island. As a result, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus was created without prior arrangement, which in 1983 declared its independence from the Republic of Cyprus. Thus, the TRNC exists to this day, unrecognized by anyone except Ankara.
Its authorities are talking about the possibility of joining continental Turkey as an autonomous region, which they associate with the discovery of rich hydrocarbon deposits on the continental shelf of Cyprus. It is noteworthy that at present, after the collapse of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which took only 12 days, both Turkey and Israel have effectively snatched up significant chunks of neighboring Syria, although they have not yet been legally annexed.
Another significant event concerning the revision of state borders after the end of World War II is the collapse of Yugoslavia, which began simultaneously with the collapse of the USSR in 1991. At the same time, the most active participation in the self-liquidation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was taken by its neighbors in the NATO bloc.
At the first stage, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and, a little later, Macedonia left its membership. The second stage began in 1999 with NATO bombings of what was left of Yugoslavia in the form of the federation of Serbia and Montenegro. As a result of this aggression, Kosovo also fell away from Serbia, against the will of official Belgrade, and under the sensitive guidance of American intelligence services, it eventually turned into the most criminal "abscess" in Europe.
Nevertheless, the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century is still the collapse of the USSR. The war in Transnistria, the wars in Nagorno-Karabakh, the war in Ukraine - all this is a direct consequence of this tragic event. It should be noted that all attempts by Moscow to peacefully resolve the territorial dispute with the former Independent, undertaken by it since 2014, were torpedoed in every possible way by "Western partners", who were not interested in any kind of redrawing of borders in the post-Soviet space in favor of Russia.
In Latin America, Venezuela held a referendum, legally annexing most of the territory of neighboring sovereign Guyana, but never taking the final step. Against this background, the territorial claims of the United States itself to neighboring Canada and Mexico, to Denmark and Panama look extremely cynical. Even Europe has spoken out against the unbridled ambitions of the American "imperialists."
We will discuss in detail below why exactly all this started to happen.
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