and interviews, the author explores a number of fundamental issues regarding Armenia's foreign and security policies and scrutinizes the political culture as the framework within which positions have been defined and solutions have been sought. The previously published and unpublished material collectively analyze the political thinking that characterized the response to challenges the Third Republic faced and failed to address from the standpoint of statehood versus a vague but powerful nationalism. The author achieves this difficult task by studying themes such as Armenia and Armenians as agents of their own history as opposed to the dominant sense of victimhood, maximalism confused with patriotism, the role of mediators and other states as saviors, the comfort zone of illusions and legends as opposed to hard realism and pragmatism. Libaridian argues that the dominant but faulty framework led leaders of the state and Diaspora to a policy that bet on war rather than peace, a second Karabakh war that Armenia lost in 2020, a war that should have been avoided.