Here is a comprehensive article by a self-described Nagorno-Karabakh nerd, including recent and past history along with our policy challenges. Well worth a full read, from Antiwar.com, by the refreshingly common sense journalism of Dan Sjursen.

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2020/10/01/no-dog-in-the-figh...

No Dog in the Fight: Nagorno-Karabakh’s Conflict Isn’t About Us (or Russia)
by Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.) Posted on October 02, 2020

... The US has long had its vulturous eyes on the region, especially after the Soviet Union’s final collapse in 1991. It still does – more so maybe. As a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College (CGSC) in 2016-17, all us officers focused almost exclusively on planning fictitious, but highly realistic, combat missions in the South Caucasus region. As I recall, our recurring scenario involved defending Azerbaijan (and, incidentally, its pipelines and Caspian Basin energy sources) from a northbound attack from a breakaway statelet of ethnic-Azeri Iranians. We planned, practiced, and simulated offloading troops, tanks, and supplies at Georgia’s Black Sea ports, through its capital Tbilisi – bypassing Russian and Armenian territory, and staying clear of the Nagorno-Karabakh third-rail, naturally – into the frontlines in southern Azerbaijan. Come to think of it, in the war-game, US forces traced a rather reverse route of the corporate-crafted BTC (Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Turkey) pipeline…must’ve been a coincidence.

… The view from Moscow – and frankly from objective outer space – is clear: since the late 1990s, the US has geographically (through overt NATO eastward-expansion) and diplomatically (by denying any legitimacy to Russia’s sphere, or say, in regional affairs) caged-in the Bear. Washington would’ve gone far further if its (at a minimum) encouraged "color revolutions" along Russia’s borders – "Rose:" Georgia, 2003; "Orange:" Ukraine, 2004; "Denim" and "Tulip:" Belarus and Kyrgyzstan, 2005) hadn’t fallen flat, and that pesky Putin hadn’t used force in 2008 to keep a rather aggressive little Georgia from joining NATO. It’s only gotten worse since then, as the entire bipartisan Washington establishment has donned facts-resistant Russia-alarm goggles, particularly since Donald Trump’s election. Pundits and politicians alike now view every global conflict through these Moscow-facing lens.

Then there’s the money to follow. While its markets, sources, and the US supply-situation have since diminished certain energy-urgency, Washington seems stuck in the oil-is-everything past. It was that calculus which, in the late 1990s, helped push America towards Azeri-amenable positions in the Caucasus. The key was that BTC pipeline and the announcement by Papa Aliyev of "the Contract of the Century" – apparently strongmen speak similar slangs. That centennial deal amounted to an agreement with a consortium of oil companies – Amoco, Pennzoil, British Petroleum, Unocal, McDermott, Statoil, Lukoil, and the state-owned Turkish and Saudi enterprises, which granted them exclusive rights to Azerbaijan’s oil and gas reserves.

Adding insult to injury, it’s another "inconvenient truth” of his career that in 1997, now environmentalist-guru and then vice president Al Gore presided over the White House signing ceremony of four additional Caspian Sea contracts between Aliyev-senior and US oil giants Exxon, Chevron, Mobil, and Amoco (which merged with British Petroleum-BP a year later). The deals were reportedly worth some $8 billion. As it relates to NK, there’s one salient fact to keep in mind: Armenia has no oil reserves to speak of. But I’m sure that nasty corporate cash would never sway the evenhandedness of honest Abe’s successors in Washington.

… Meanwhile, on Monday, that supposed Moscow-mule of an American president, Donald J. Trump, simply said of the current NK-outbreak, "We’re looking at it very strongly…We’ll see if we can stop it."

Trump is hardly a geostrategic whiz – one doubts he’d ever heard tell of Nagorno-Karabakh. Still, like it (or him) or not, in this case his perfunctory, and somewhat dismissive, realism inadvertently reflects what’s what. Sad indeed, that it takes a foreign policy sub-neophyte like The Donald to put his finger on what’s at stake and what’s not for the US in NK; to denote the limits of American power, interests, and investment in this Caucasus backwater. But it is what it is.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, count me highly Hippocratic: "primum non nocere"…"first, do no harm."