ISRAEL IN THE SOUTHERN CAUCASUS: POLITICAL ASPECTS
Keywords:
Israel, the Southern Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan, GeorgiaAbstract
For obvious reasons, Israel’s policy in the Southern Caucasus is a post-Soviet phenomenon, at the first stage of which Israel was building up a favorable geopolitical environment in the region far removed from its borders. It was no rival for the main actors involved in geopolitical contention in this part of the former Soviet Union.
At the same time, Israel’s interests were not limited to purely economic issues and the agenda of its exporter companies. Its geopolitical struggle against Iran and complicated relations with Turkey, which claimed a dominant position in the Southern Caucasus, forced Israel to rely on the steadily expanding range of its foreign policy instruments in the region.
Israel identified the support of potential Jewish émigrés to Israel as its main task in the post-Soviet Southern Caucasus. In the first years after the disintegration of the U.S.S.R., the region lost tens of thousands of Jews, while Israel welcomed the highly qualified specialists that it needed. On the whole, Israel practices different approaches to each of the South Caucasian states, fine- tuning them to the tasks resolved by Tel-Aviv in this region. Its highly developed relations with Azerbaijan are based on economic interests and oil imports. The relations with Georgia and Armenia are less developed. Turkey, which is very interested in building closer economic ties with the former, can hardly tolerate rivalry, while closer relations with the latter are complicated by the Iranian factor.
Despite political complications and weakly developed economic relations, Israel preserves its significant interest in the region: together with Central Asia it is seen as a “remote security belt.”
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