YEREVAN and SEVAN, Armenia — In 2020, Armenia suffered a huge military defeat at the hands of its historic rival Azerbaijan. Three years later, Azerbaijan compounded the indignity by overrunning the breakaway statelet of Nagorno-Karabakh, displacing its ethnically Armenian inhabitants.

For many Armenians, the losses were a deep humiliation, and they laid the blame at the feet of their prime minister, Nikol Pashinyan – all the more so because he signed a peace deal framework at the White House last August between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Now, Mr. Pashinyan is trying not just to realize peace, but to dramatically – and controversially – shift the foreign policy that has guided the Maryland-sized nation of 3 million since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. He is seeking a thaw with historic enemies Azerbaijan and Turkey while also reducing Armenia’s dependence on its traditional ally Russia, by building new links to the European Union and the United States.

And on June 7, Armenians will get to vote in parliamentary elections that will decide whether Mr. Pashinyan, the man who lost the war, will get a chance to execute his vision of peace.

“It’s a choice between the current trajectory versus the possibility of a reversal,” says Anna Ohanyan, an international relations professor at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts...

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