Beginning of Winter: The George H.W. Bush Administration, the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, and the Emergence of the Post–Cold War World

The conflict that arose between Soviet Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh in 1988 festered throughout the final years of the Soviet Union and sparked a major war between the newly independent Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1992–1994. Most accounts of this period have suggested that the administration of George H. W. Bush took a largely hands-off approach to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, but this article shows that in fact the Bush administration pursued a much more active policy that reflected support for the Soviet Union and then Russia, a strong domestic Armenian-American lobby, and regional priorities, as well as a growing awareness of the West's failure to stem violence in Yugoslavia. The Bush administration was hoping to prevent all-out war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but after the war began, the administration did what it could to try to limit and halt the violence.