Strategy and statecraft Opinion by Neven Cvetićanin

Neven Cvetićanin, President of the Forum for Strategic Studies and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences in Belgrade has written an article on Azerbaijan's smart energy strategy and skilful international policy with the country's gas and oil projects soaring to new heights. Caliber.Az reprints the piece.

The difference between strategy and tactics is as great as the difference between far-sighted statesmanship and so-called daily politics. An American sage said that a statesman thinks about the next generations, and a (classical) politician thinks about the next elections (which is especially relevant in Serbia this pre-election week). In the fast and dangerous world in which we live, those nations that are able to think strategically and produce far-sighted statesmen have a slight advantage over those nations that are eternally spinning in the vicious circle of shallow daily policies.

One such lucky nation is Azerbaijan, whose president has just visited Serbia to launch the gas interconnector in Nis with the presidents of Serbia and Bulgaria and a representative of the European Commission. The story with the interconnector is only a small part of Azerbaijan's strategic thinking, which skilfully used Europe's need for energy diversification and the need for gas to be supplied to it from several different sources. Since the time of its legendary president Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan has sketched a smart energy strategy according to which gas and (to a lesser extent) oil will be pumped and pumped and pumped, in order to invest the financial resources earned in the transformation and modernization of the energy sector itself, as well as the whole society. President Ilham Aliyev, the son of the previous one, brought the so-called strategy to its peak, in a very rare story in which one capable statesman inherits another, so Azeri. Unlike for example the Arabs they invest the money earned from the export of classic raw energy products in the production of "clean" electricity (solar, hydro and energy from waste), which they then plan to export to Europe via underwater cables under the Black Sea.

In addition to all that, Azerbaijan also managed to host the prestigious global "green" COP29 summit next year. The way he managed it is also an example of refined statesmanship. Namely, after Armenia's threat to block Azerbaijan's bid to host this prestigious summit due to the well-known events in Nagorno-Karabakh, there followed six weeks of secret negotiations between the two sides, directly and without mediators, which ended in the middle of last week with the decision to support Armenia's hosting of Azerbaijan for COP29, with an "incidental" agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war (Azeris will "return" thirty-two prisoners of war to the Armenians, and two prisoners of war to the Armenians to the Azerbaijanis) and Azerbaijan's support for Armenia to enter the Eastern European board of the COP.

In the past thirty years, the two parties have never reached an agreement on anything, which can perhaps be attributed to the various mediators who put more of their interests into their disputes than theirs. When the two sides "sat down" to talk directly in a statesmanlike and responsible manner, they agreed on these, still small things, promising that they could also agree on the bigger ones.

This can be a lesson for all of us in the Balkans, who too easily and often get involved in the mud of daily policies, instead of turning to constructive and far-sighted statesmanship that will provide peace, development and prosperity to our small part of the world.