Azerbaijan is already friendly with Israel. Why the push to 'normalize'?

With President Donald Trump sending mixed messages on Iran — on the one hand, reinstating his “maximum pressure” campaign and threatening military action; on the other, signaling an eagerness to negotiate — anti-diplomacy voices are working overtime to find new ways to lock the U.S. and Iran into perpetual enmity.

The last weeks have seen a mounting campaign, in both the U.S. and Israel, to integrate Azerbaijan, Iran’s northern neighbor, into the Abraham Accords — the 2020 set of “normalization deals” between Israel and a number of Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco. The leading Israeli think tank Begin-Sadat Center argued that Baku would be a perfect addition to the club. A number of influential rabbis, led by the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, Marvin Hier, and the main rabbi of the UAE, Eli Abadi (who happens to be a close associate to Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who was himself instrumental in forging the original Abraham Accords), also sent a letter to Trump promoting Baku’s inclusion. The Wall Street Journal and Forbes amplified these messages on their op-ed pages.

At first blush, such activism may appear puzzling. Azerbaijan, for all practical purposes, is already a close ally of Israel — to a much greater extent than any of the Arab signatories of the Abraham Accords.

When, in the early 1990s, Israel defined Iran as its main threat, it sought ties with Azerbaijan as a counter. Baku has benefited greatly from that relationship: Israel played a key role in Azerbaijan’s defeat of Armenia in wars over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2020 and 2023. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel accounted for up to 70% of Azerbaijan’s imports of advanced weaponry. Azerbaijan, in turn, is Israel’s main supplier of oil, accounting for up to 40% of overall oil imports. Baku never suspended oil shipments during Israel’s war in Gaza after October 7, 2023. In a sign of further developing ties, Azerbaijan’s state oil company SOCAR recently acquired a 10% stake in Israel’s offshore “Tamar” gas field.

Thus, the added value of Azerbaijan joining the Abraham Accords is not obvious on its merits alone. The real agenda here appears to be to add the United States to the existing bilateral alliance. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, in fact, announced that Israel seeks to “establish a strong foundation for trilateral collaboration” with the U.S. and Azerbaijan. Seth Cropsey and Joseph Epstein spelled out the aim of such an alliance in their March 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed: to significantly increase pressure on Iran’s northern border.

Yet there is an obstacle to the full realization of that scheme: Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, enacted by Congress in the context of the first Nagorno-Karabakh war in the early 1990s at the urgings of the influential American-Armenian lobby, forbids U.S. aid and arms sales to Azerbaijan. Since the beginning of the Global War on Terror, successive presidents have waived that provision as Azerbaijan was found to be a useful partner. In that context, Baku pitched itself as a key ally against Tehran, including through illicit lobbying of Congress members.

Azerbaijan’s Israeli and American backers claim that the announcement of an impending “peace deal” between Armenia and Azerbaijan provides a good reason for Section 907 to be repealed altogether. Yet the deal is not yet signed, with Baku constantly moving the goalposts. More ominously, Baku has intensified messaging that Armenia is preparing a revanchist war to roll back its losses. Such claims, however, would seem to defy common sense as the balance of forces in the region strongly suggests that Yerevan is in no position to militarily challenge a Turkish and Israeli-backed Azerbaijan. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has insisted that he is ready to immediately sign the peace agreement with Baku.

Baku’s stalling tactics may be explained by the desire to maximize its current leverage to extract yet more territorial concessions from Yerevan and then blame Armenia for the failure of the peace talks. In particular, Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has long claimed the southern Armenian province of Syunik (known as Zangezur in Baku) as ancestral Azeri land and vowed to “return” it. It also happens to be the small slice of Armenian territory that borders Iran and cuts mainland Azerbaijan off from its exclave Nakhchivan. Azerbaijan has long demanded the establishment of the so-called “Zangezur corridor” that would connect it directly with Turkey. That demand is not addressed in the current draft peace agreement; nor, however, has it been dropped from Baku’s agenda, which makes Armenia particularly vulnerable to renewed military pressure from Azerbaijan.

For itself, Iran has made it abundantly clear that any change to the borders in the South Caucasus is unacceptable. Tehran fears that the loss of the border with Armenia will isolate it from the region and enable its rival Turkey and arch-enemy Israel to consolidate their foothold in its backyard. To prevent that, Tehran has conducted massive military exercises along its border with Azerbaijan and warned that it would intervene militarily, if necessary. So far, that has been enough to deter Baku’s irredentist plans. Those warnings have had their desired effect: since then, both Baku and Tehran have taken steps to deescalate tensions.

The push to add Azerbaijan to the Abraham Accords, which Trump considers his signature first-term foreign policy achievement, appears aimed at elevating Baku’s relationship to Washington, and thus potentially emboldening Azerbaijan to take a more assertive stance vis-à-vis Iran. Positioning Azerbaijan at the vanguard of the anti-Iran coalition also aims at galvanizing Iran’s own large Azeri community (up to 20% of the total population). Hard-line U.S. neoconservatives and organizations, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, and their Israeli counterparts have long argued for encouraging Iran’s ethnic and religious minority communities, including Azeris, to rise up against the regime.

There is no doubt that Israel and Azerbaijan would welcome “trilateral collaboration” with the U.S. that Netanyahu’s office favors. But it is difficult to see how it would serve long-term U.S. interests, particularly its interest in avoiding new military commitments in the Greater Middle East that could entangle Washington in alliances that could drag it into new wars there, either directly or by proxy.

Moreover, there certainly isn’t any compelling reason for the U.S. to reward Azerbaijan — a far-flung, corrupt and despotic dynastic regime guilty of ethnically cleansing 120,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and abusing the human rights of its own people. Azerbaijan’s strategic significance to the U.S. is negligible. It mostly hinges on a massively inflated “Iran threat.” A far better way forward would be for Washington to settle its differences with Tehran in a peaceful way, as indeed Trump purports to want to do. Among other benefits, it would remove any excuses for unnecessary entanglements with yet more unsavory clients.