Suren Sargsyan: "I predict high-level Armenian-American contacts in the near future"

International expert Suren Sargsyan wrote on his Facebook page: "Next year there will be high-level Armenian-American contacts. If we look at history, we can see that the peak of high-level Armenian-American contacts occurred when there was an opportunity for progress on the Nagorno-Karabakh issue or a prospect for the normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations. The evidence for this is the visit of Ter-Petrosyan to Washington in 1994 (his approaches on these two issues received support from the Clinton administration), the same can be said about Kocharian's meeting in Key West in 2002, and the same can be said about the Sargsyan-Obama meeting during the football diplomacy, which was followed by two visits from Secretary of State Clinton.

As a former deputy secretary of state once told me, "our president will never put his reputation on a 'non-existent' process. However, if the process has a positive outcome for U.S. interests, the president will personally get involved." Considering this, I predict high-level bilateral Armenian-American contacts in the near future, driven by the same agenda issues.

These contacts do not signify a positive attitude towards our authorities. The U.S. has its interests in our region, which it can realize when there are no conflicts here. There cannot be a process of Armenian-Turkish reconciliation or any resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh issue without the involvement of the U.S. president, especially when Biden called on Erdogan to initiate the Armenian-Turkish process.

In the near future, our officials will be invited to Washington and encouraged to take concrete and swift actions. The same, of course, applies to Turkey and Azerbaijan. Ultimately, the November 9 statement and the Sochi agreements have already been legitimized by Brussels and Paris, and now it is Washington's turn."