Hello, and welcome to The Best & The Brightest, Wednesday foreign policy edition because I was off and fasting for Yom Kippur. I atoned for, among many things, messing up the TBTB calendar this week.

Before we get to the meat of the matter—what would happen to Ukraine if Matt Gaetz had his way—I wanted to draw your attention again to the tragedy unfolding in Nagorno-Karabakh. Last week, I mentioned that war was breaking out there—Azerbaijan moved to seize the mostly Armenian enclave—but that the fighting ended within 24 hours. The army of Nagorno-Karabakh folded and Azerbaijan took control of the region. Now, a flood of tens of thousands of Armenian refugees out of Nagorno-Karabakh and into Armenia is so large that it can be seen from space.

Secretary of State Tony Blinken has been working the phones with the leaders of both Armenia and Azerbaijan. U.S.A.I.D. Administrator Samantha Power, who made her name ringing the alarm over the genocide in Bosnia, visited the border between the two countries this week and promised more American aid. But the crisis is continuing unabated. Today, the president of Nagorno-Karabakh was arrested and transferred to Baku.

I happened to call Russian foreign policy provocateur (and college classmate of Sergei Lavrov) Andranik Migranyan today for my main story and found him quite literally huffing and puffing with rage. Ironically, Migranyan, who is an ethnic Armenian, wasn’t mad at Russia, which had mediated the 2020 ceasefire and whose peacekeepers were supposed to...