I'm John Besser with Gregory Coppley of Defense and Foreign Affairs outlining a new world for the Middle East and North South Corridor, it passes along the shore

of the Caspian Sea through Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a republic that is friendly with the United States and with Israel and with the whole region.

There's a railroad station there that will be part of the mix.

However, the Azerbaijani's have been in conflict with Armenia since the end of the

Soviet Union and Gregory you're reporting that Armenia is going through a major

transformation now having asked the Russians to leave. Where are they going?

Well that's the thing. They packed up their bags and left their relationship with Russia without knowing where they're going.

Armenia, as you know, is a very isolated landlocked country bordering on Turkey, on Georgia and on Azerbaijan and Iran.

And so it really has to be careful as to what it does. It's basically faced decades or even centuries of

hostility from Turkey and has been rightly become quite nervous and paranoid about that and it's therefore taken refuge in the fact that

you have a Turkic speaking country Azerbaijan on its eastern flank.

And at 1991 or so the Armenians literally took over by military force large areas of Azerbaijan including

the enclave which was largely peopled by Armenians living in Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh.

And this led to a lot of hostility.

Azerbaijan was a poor for much of that region, had a much bigger population than Armenia, and subsequently

the Armenians kept provoking the Azerbaijans, failing to somehow understand that Azerbaijan in the past 15 years or so has become

immensely wealthy from oil and gas revenues and has modernized it.

Military capabilities had built up links,

not only with Turkey, because Turkey was anxious to help it,

but also with Israel and the like.

So Armenia was stuck with two allies, Iran, which the old Armenian Empire of

antiquity dominated a lot of that area and subsequently the the Persian

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