Good post and I love Thomas Sowell - he’s a must read for everybody who considers themselves amateur historians.
Let’s start with Armenia being an historically Christian nation in the Muslim “Middle East” at the cross roads of the Caucasus Region which has a long bloody history of ethnic genocide going back before Alexander the Great even touched the area.
That area is really a convergence of dynasties, empires, and kingdoms. Most people have never heard of Tigranes the Great. He’s a good one to research and backpedal from there on how much war has been constant in that area.
Years ago, I had Armenia and Azerbaijan as part of my MI ‘research area’ on the former “...Stans” after the dissolution of the USSR. R.W.C. is quite correct, this problem is historically religious in nature and it does go back to after Armenia became Christian and rejected/fought against the later Muslims who attempted to conquer the country and erase the Christians. And in that area of the world, as well as the Balkans, ethnic and religious hatreds born a thousand plus years ago, are still being fought out.
Think of it as never ending “wars of revenge” for past disputes.