Beniamin Matevosyan: Iran wants to win, Pashinyan wanted to lose in 2020

(A comparative analysis of the 44-day war and the US-Iran confrontation)

A comparative analysis of Iran’s strategy in its current standoff with the United States and Armenia’s conduct during the 2020 war reveals a fundamental difference in strategic intent between Iranian leadership and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan. While Tehran, following Ali Larijani’s asymmetric doctrine, is methodically turning the region into a zone of economic losses for the opposing coalition, Yerevan in 2020 displayed an inexplicable “diplomatic courtesy” toward the enemy’s critical infrastructure.

Iran is sending Washington an unambiguous message: there will be no stability and no investment until the threat to the Iranian people is removed, and it is backing that message with strikes on assets of critical importance to American economic interests. Attacks on major LNG terminals in Qatar and oil hubs in Saudi Arabia, through which the bulk of Western capital flows, have already sent energy price forecasts into disarray. Drone strikes on Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and Bahrain, along with direct attacks on Citibank branches in Dubai and Manama, demonstrate that Iran is not merely targeting military installations, it is going after the wallet of a global power, making the continuation of aggression toxic for markets.

Against this backdrop, Armenia’s failure in 2020 to strike the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline or the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway looks less like a tactical oversight and more like a deliberate abandonment of deterrence leverage. While Pashinyan effectively shielded Azerbaijan’s and Turkey’s transit revenues, a genuine asymmetric strategy would have called for strikes on targets whose destruction would have made Baku’s victory a pyrrhic one. Beyond the aforementioned pipelines, such targets should have included the Mingachevir hydroelectric dam: destroying this node would not only have paralyzed Azerbaijan’s power grid but created insurmountable logistical obstacles for advancing forces in the lowlands. Another critical target was the Sangachal terminal – the nerve center of Azerbaijan’s entire oil and gas industry. A single precision strike on this “Achilles’ heel” would have crashed Baku’s credit rating and forced Western shareholders of BP and Chevron to demand an immediate ceasefire to protect their billion-dollar investments. Also left untouched were the offshore platforms of the Azeri-Chirag-Gunashli field, which represent the long-term financial backbone of Azerbaijani aggression.

The IRGC’s current rhetoric toward Trump, dismissing his attempts at deal-making as absurd, underscores that Iran has no intention of losing on a script written in someone else’s office. Tehran understands that in modern warfare, victory goes not so much to whoever seizes the high ground or controls the skies, but to whoever makes holding that high ground unprofitable and the enemy’s “victory too costly.” In Armenia’s case, the absence of strikes on Azerbaijan’s “energy backbone” points toward the deliberate sabotage of national interests by the country’s own leadership.

This is precisely why establishing a new commission to examine the details of the 2020 war, following a change of political regime, is not merely a matter of justice, but an act of national security. We need to understand why an army that possessed the means to inflict strategic damage became a passive spectator to the destruction of its own future, while Iran today is proving that even against a technically superior adversary, one can dictate terms through controlled chaos in the aggressor’s economy.
Think about that.