Michael Rubin's case against Azerbaijan is a tidy one: Baku is spending billions on weapons, trades with Iran, and helps Russia evade sanctions — so it must be arming to invade Armenia, and waiving Section 907 only rewards a coming aggressor. It is a convincing argument, right up until you open a map.
Azerbaijan is the only country on earth that borders both Russia and Iran, wedged between two powers that have spent the past two years making plain what they think of its independence. A small state in that position does not get to "write off" its giant neighbors any more than Armenia, which trades with Iran far more dependently, gets to write off Tehran. Trade between neighbors is a fact of geography, not a declaration of loyalty. Far more revealing is the hostility both neighbors aim at Azerbaijan.
Start with Iran. Just this spring, Iranian drones struck the airport in Azerbaijan's exclave of Nakhchivan. Days earlier, Azerbaijani security services had rolled up an IRGC cell plotting attacks on critical infrastructure and Jewish targets. None of this was new: Iran has massed troops on the border, run large-scale drills aimed squarely at Baku, funded a terror proxy that seeks to overthrow the government, and threatened to turn the region into a "graveyard" for what its officials branded the “mercenaries of Donald Trump.” Those are not the gestures of a friendly trading partner.
Read the full article on The Washington Examiner.
Joseph Epstein is Director of the Turan Research Center.