The framing trap in Armenia’s foreign policy debate
My good friend Ara Tadevosyan, Director of Mediamax, in his op-ed published on March 24, formulated five questions that he believes the Armenian opposition must answer during the current parliamentary campaign in order to give the public a clearer picture before they go to the polls on June 7. In a political environment marked by a suffocating shortage of sensible discourse, his effort to impose some structure on the debate is, at first glance, understandable and welcome. Yet, precisely because these questions are presented as ‘rational’, they deserve to be examined by the same standard they claim to uphold. In the discussion below, I argue that their rationality is far less self-evident than it appears. My critique is informed in part by insights from a discipline I have been teaching for the last six years – Foreign Policy Analysis – which, among other things, draws attention to the way elite framing, public opinion, and contested national role conceptions interact to shape foreign policy discourse and, ultimately, foreign policy outcomes.
The problem with these questions is not simply tone. It is the structure. They do not merely seek clarification; they shape the answer space in advance. Before the opposition even responds, the wording already sorts possible answers into categories such as “responsible” and “irresponsible,” “peace-oriented” and “war-prone”. This is not a trivial rhetorical issue. I will argue why the framing of the five questions essentially narrows the space before any substantive debate can begin.
From an academic perspective, this matters because foreign policy is not only about how a state responds to external constraints. It is also about how elites define situations, frame options, and shape the meaning of policy choices before decisions are made. The framing of the question is therefore already part of the elite contestation of foreign policy choices, affecting how and what the public thinks. The framing determines which answers sound legitimate, which alternatives appear extreme, and which strategic visions are made to look unrealistic before they are even articulated.
The first problem in the proposed five questions is the use of false binaries. The peace agreement question is presented as if the opposition must either sign the August 2025 U.S.-brokered document or reopen negotiations from scratch. But serious foreign policymaking rarely works in such a binary way. Leave alone that the Washington document is only initialed, not signed, but there is also evidence that Azerbaijan itself has since come up with more preconditions - expecting Armenia to double down before Azerbaijan itself shoulders any obligations. In other words, state commitment to deals is conditioned by acceptance on reciprocity, sequencing, guarantees, or enforceability. The question does not merely simplify reality. It falls into the binary trap made by Azerbaijan.
The second problem is normalising Armenia’s weakness. The question about Constitutional amendment does not begin by asking whether Azerbaijan’s demand belongs within the legitimate space of negotiations at all, whether the current state of affairs can be reversed by good diplomacy, etc. Instead, it quietly normalizes that demand and asks only whether the opposition is prepared to comply or, in other words, is reckless enough to reject. This is a major framing problem. It shifts the burden from the demander to the respondent. Rejecting the premise is then made to look like rejecting peace itself. That is not a rational question and shall not be answered as is. It is narrative preloading.
The third problem is continuity bias, though here the issue should be framed more carefully. TRIPP remains, at this stage, a high-level political intention signaled by Armenia and the United States rather than an immutable legal architecture. Even signed memoranda or agreements can later be frozen or reshaped by external developments - it happens elsewhere. More importantly, a small state like Armenia does not realistically have the capacity to simply reverse such a framework once a firmer legal basis is in place, nor should public debate be reduced to a theatrical test of whether the opposition is willing to dump the US-Armenia collaboration - even if it’s yet a promise. That is not a strategy. The real question is whether the opposition can explain how TRIPP - and any other, broader connectivity project in the South Caucasus involving Armenia - should be structured so that Armenia secures the greatest possible sovereignty, security, and developmental benefit. That, rather than symbolic bravado, is what serious debate should address.
The fourth problem is the conflation of tone with achievement, especially on the Turkey and Azerbaijan tracks. Softened rhetoric is presented as evidence of progress, allowing tone to substitute for substance. But improved language is not a deliverable, and elites should not be lured into treating it as one. The IRI polling is telling: negative attitudes toward relations with Turkey fell from 89 percent in March 2023 to 69 percent now, likely due in part to sustained narrative-building in Armenia rather than to any meaningful shift in Turkey’s posture. Sporadic statements from Ankara suggest no strategic change toward Armenia. The shift, then, reflects rising optimism in Armenia more than changing realities in Turkey - and, in part, the failure of elite contestation to challenge that optimism. Once rhetoric is treated as an outcome, the real question - what Armenia is actually gaining, and what risks it may be normalizing - disappears behind the optics of diplomatic civility.
This is where role theory becomes especially relevant. One of its core insights is that national role conceptions are not fixed; they are contested among elites and between elites and society. As K. J. Holsti put it in 1970, they are “the policymakers’ own definitions of the general kinds of decisions, commitments, rules and actions suitable to their state, and of the functions, if any, their state should perform on a continuing basis in the international system or in subordinate regional systems. It is their ‘image’ of the appropriate orientations or functions of their state toward, or in, the external environment.” Foreign policy debates are thus often struggles over what kind of state a country imagines itself to be and what role it ought to play externally. Armenian elites, whether in government or in opposition, should therefore clarify and publicly contest their respective visions of Armenia’s national role. The government has made its view increasingly clear. What remains insufficiently articulated is the counter-elite’s version. The struggle, in other words, is also over Armenia’s national role itself.
A second lesson, this time from the study of public opinion in foreign policy, is equally important. Public opinion is not simply a spontaneous bottom-up expression of what society thinks. It is often shaped from above through elite framing, media repetition, and agenda-setting. The effect of such framing lies not only in changing minds directly, but in shaping what the public sees as legitimate, realistic, and worthy of serious consideration. That is exactly what is at stake here. The five questions do not merely seek information from the opposition. They help train - not to exaggerate here though - the public to view some answers as inherently prudent and others as inherently dangerous. In that sense, they are partly shaping public opinion from above by narrowing the boundaries of acceptable foreign policy discourse.
This is why better questions matter. A rational question should not impose its preferred answer structure in advance. It should clarify alternatives, reveal trade-offs, and force political actors to state their criteria. It should not normalize concessions silently. It should not erase middle ground. And it should not confuse improved tone with strategic success.
A sharper and more rational reformulation would therefore look something like this:
1. How do you assess the initialed agreement with Azerbaijan? What is your imagined roadmap of how it should be implemented if and when signed into effect?
2. Azerbaijan has made, and continues to make, preconditions ahead of signing the so-called peace agreement. Where is the red line beyond which meeting such preconditions must stop?
3-4. What is your position on TRIPP and other connectivity projects involving Armenia: continuity, revision, or termination? By what national-interest criteria - above all sovereignty, security, and economic benefit - would guide your choice?
5. What’s your understanding of Armenia-Turkey relations now? (Armenia-Russia, Armenia-EU and others for that matter too).
These questions are better because they move the debate away from symbolic signaling and toward strategic judgment. They ask the opposition not merely whether it is “for” or “against” a given process, but how it understands the logic, limits, and terms of that process from the standpoint of Armenia’s interests. They force clearer thinking about implementation, red lines, connectivity, and Armenia’s broader external orientation. Most importantly, they invite the elite and the counter-elite to articulate their own foreign policy visions rather than merely be lured into the narrative traps managed from overseas. That is what meaningful democratic contestation should look like.
Ultimately, the central issue is not whether the opposition can produce satisfactory responses within an already established framework, but whether Armenia’s foreign policy debate can move beyond the assumptions embedded in that framework itself. Democracy is diminished when political choice is confined to rehearsing approved positions within inherited boundaries. It is strengthened only when those boundaries themselves are subjected to scrutiny. If debate is confined to pre-formulated binaries, then political pluralism risks being reduced to the mere ratification of externally and internally imposed limits. What is needed, therefore, is a more substantive inter-elite debate - one capable of clarifying Armenia’s strategic interests, articulating genuine alternatives, and restoring political agency and political imagination -to the center of foreign policy deliberation over Armenia’s place in the world.
Hovhannes Nikoghosyan is an Adjunct Assistant Professor, Political Science and International Affairs program at American University of Armenia.
The views expressed here are author's own personal views and in no way reflect the views of the American University of Armenia, or views or positions of any institution or organization.