The U.S. Should Seek Closer Defense Ties with Azerbaijan

W ashington generally counts three military powers to “matter” in the Middle East: Israel, Turkey, and Iran, the only states in the region able to project force beyond their borders. The Gulf monarchies have spent lavishly on the latest American and European equipment, but they have yet to use it effectively. That view leaves out Azerbaijan, a country of 10 million that belongs to the greater Middle East and sits on Iran’s northern border. The interests of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, align more closely with America’s than Washington realizes, and as the war with Iran drags on, the U.S. should bring Azerbaijan into its regional defense framework.

Iran has already treated Azerbaijan as a combatant. On March 5, less than a week after American and Israeli strikes began, Iranian drones hit the airport in the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan and landed near a school, injuring two people. Two days later, Azerbaijan’s State Security Service said it had broken up an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plot against the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, the Israeli Embassy, a synagogue, and members of the country’s Mountain Jewish community. Iran’s attacks against Gulf oil facilities drew wall-to-wall media coverage in the West, while the attacks on Azerbaijan were virtually ignored.

This hostility goes back decades. Tehran backed Armenia against Azerbaijan through 30 years of conflict over Karabakh. In 2015, IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani oversaw the creation of an ethnic Azerbaijani proxy to challenge President Ilham Aliyev’s secular government. In October 2022, the IRGC staged exercises on the border in which troops crossed the Aras River on pontoon bridges, a drill Baku read as a rehearsal for invasion. In 2023, Azerbaijan arrested six Iranian agents for planning a coup.

The war has also turned the Caspian Sea into a strategic theater. With the U.S. Navy blockading Iran’s southern ports, Tehran has shifted trade north, and Iranian officials say the Caspian ports’ share of essential imports has risen from 18 percent before the war to 30 percent. Russia has used the same waters to rearm Iran. NBC News reported in August that more than two dozen ships had carried ammunition, drone components, and explosives across the Caspian, unscathed, to replenish Iranian stockpiles.

Relations with Russia have been strained beneath the surface since both split from the Soviet Union in 1991. Baku resents the role Moscow played in the Karabakh conflict, using the dispute to keep both countries dependent on it, and the Kremlin has always treated Baku like a colonial possession. What has changed is Russia’s leverage. The war in Ukraine has tied down its army, and Karabakh no longer exists as a separatist entity Moscow can exploit: Azerbaijan retook the region in 2023, and Russian peacekeepers left the following year. When Russian air defenses shot down an Azerbaijan Airlines jet in December 2024, Aliyev demanded that Moscow admit responsibility, and in October 2025, Vladimir Putin relented.

Baku wants to protect itself against both neighbors, keep the Middle Corridor linking China and Central Asia to Europe stable, and defend the offshore platforms and pipelines that matter more as Europe weans itself off Russian oil and gas. In return, it can offer a military tested in combat in 2020 and 2023, modern Israeli and Turkish weapons, and kinship to millions of Iranian Azerbaijanis, Iran’s largest minority.

Israel grasped this three decades ago. In October 1995, Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s then-president and father of the current one, told former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that his country had a “long and troublesome border with Iran” and asked for help with security. Cooperation has deepened ever since. Azerbaijan has bought Israel’s Barak MX air-defense system in a deal valued at about $1.2 billion, two OptSat-500 surveillance satellites for about $120 million, Harop loitering munitions, and LORA ballistic missiles. Azerbaijani crude oil, pumped through the BTC pipeline — from Baku to the Turkish port of Ceyhan — supplies a large share of Israel’s oil. Ilham Aliyev once told American diplomats that the relationship was “like an iceberg, nine-tenths of it is below the surface,” and Benjamin Netanyahu’s office has announced talks with Washington on a trilateral cooperation format with Israel and Azerbaijan.

Like the Gulf monarchies, Baku has long been a target of Iranian aggression. And like the Gulf monarchies, it won’t stake its security on the war while Washington’s aims remain unclear. A small country on Iran’s border can’t afford to be left holding the bag if the U.S. settles for a deal that leaves the regime wounded and vengeful. The administration appears to be seeking concessions from Tehran rather than its collapse. That strengthens the case for building up Azerbaijan’s land and Caspian defenses, which serves American interests, however the war ends.

Congress should begin by repealing Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Passed in 1992 in response to Azerbaijan’s blockade of Armenia, it bars most U.S. assistance to the Azerbaijani government. The blockade is long gone, and the two countries now trade: Azerbaijan has shipped fuel to Armenia since last December, and this month, Armenia made its first export to Azerbaijan, a shipment of aluminum foil. The State Department extended the waiver last month. But waivers lapse, and Baku knows it. Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov pressed members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to repeal the provision in January, and a bill to do so, H.R. 6534, awaits action.

Washington should then sell Azerbaijan equipment to defend itself and the corridor: air and missile defense and counter-drone systems to protect cities and pipelines, patrol vessels and coastal defenses for the Caspian Sea, and surveillance and reconnaissance assets that would give both countries a clearer — and more actionable — picture of Iranian and Russian traffic on the sea.

Iran is weaker than it has been in decades, and Russia is tied down in Ukraine. Neither is in a position to punish Baku for moving closer to Washington. By acting now, the U.S. can secure a capable partner on Iran’s northern border and a foothold on the sea Russia uses to resupply Tehran, at the modest price of a repealed statute and a set of arms sales.