Armenia and Turkey's periodic efforts to make peace tend to hit a wall, but the nettlesome neighbors seem to be, once again, having another semi-go at rapprochement. Turkey has been invited to attend a Black Sea summit in Yerevan and Ankara is reportedly trying to resuscitate the failed international mediation campaign to end one of the region’s longest-running disputes.
For reasons that remain open to interpretation, Ankara reportedly recently dusted off its foreign-policy master plan, ambitiously billed as "Zero Problems with Neighbors," to call for normalizing with Armenia whatever can be normalized.
Granted, we've been down this road before. Despite all the cheerleading from the US, a 2009 campaign to reconcile the two flopped. Both sides remain hostages to past and present regional conflicts -- namely, the World-War-I-era slaughter of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, and the 1988-1994 conflict over breakaway Nagorno Karabakh between Armenia and close Turkish ally Azerbaijan.
But this time, the cease-fire violations between Armenia and Azerbaijan are more frequent, and the international community, arguably, more concerned about a resumption of war.
So, the thinking may go, maybe it's time to shake things up a bit.
This time round, the US, one of the overseers of the Armenian-Azerbaijani negotiations, is keeping its cards to its chest, however.
US Secretary of State John Kerry had a phone chat with both Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan before their November 19 tête-à-tête in Vienna, but, when asked that same day about how things were looking for the talks, a State Department spokesperson appeared to be at a momentary loss for words.
She did not specify whether or not Kerry had talked reconciliation with Armenia with visiting Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.
Davutoğlu, who called the invitation "routine," had said that he would attend the December 12 Black Sea Economic Cooperation forum in Yerevan if Aliyev and Sargsyan made progress during their get-together.
After nearly 20 years of these presidential chitchats, that, however, is a mighty big "if." As usual, little concrete detail emerged from the Viennese get-together beyond the usual vows to work toward a peaceful resolution of the Karabakh conflict.
For now, no startlingly new ideas appear to be on the horizon. Turkey's Today’s Zaman reported earlier this month that Davutoğlu had asked Switzerland, which played the role of mediator during the last reconciliation revue, to push Armenia to surrender two regions it holds around Karabakh; a move which would allow Ankara to dust off the reconciliation protocols.
The Swiss promised to convey the message to Armenia, the paper said. But Yerevan has heard this before. If the past is any guide, the likely off-the-record response will be: "Fat chance."
Such a quid pro quo allegedly helped deal a death blow to Armenia's earlier interest in reconciliation. Local media doesn't expect anything different this time round.
One online outlet called Ankara's overture "a permanent ticket" to a "diplomatic fiasco."
Back to the drawing board.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
Sign up for Eurasianet's free weekly newsletter. Support Eurasianet: Help keep our journalism open to all, and influenced by none.