Azerbaijan is far and away the most important country you’ve likely never heard of and almost certainly couldn’t pinpoint on an unlabeled map.
Wedged between the Russian Federation to the north, Armenia to the west, Iran to the south, and the Caspian Sea to the east, this tiny country, slightly smaller than Indiana, vastly outpunches its weight when it comes to international affairs.
And it’s not just geography that triggers this heightened importance. It’s also the fact that Azerbaijan has somehow managed to skillfully walk a proverbial tightrope over the past several decades since gaining its independence from Soviet rule, largely getting along with its neighbors to the north and the south and finally making what seems to be a lasting peace with Armenia, all while managing to avoid the typical pitfalls that come with having a majority Muslim population.
A key to its foreign affairs is adherence to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which eschews military alliances and pursues an independent foreign policy.
Despite around 96% of the population identifying as Muslim, the country considers itself a secular republic and is largely welcoming of Jews and Christians. Sure, it helps that most of its Muslims are Muslim-in-name-only or the religious equivalent of Christians who attend church only on Christmas and Easter, but it also helps that the government has been actively pursuing secularism and religious tolerance and crushing extremism since before Soviet times.
It’s a beautiful country with a rich and fascinating history, something that a small group of journalists that I was privileged to be a part of got to find out firsthand during a week-long media tour, part of which included an interview with Hikmet Hajiyev, a high-level politician who has served as the head of their Foreign Policy Affairs Department since 2018 and assistant to Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev since 2019. To gauge how his position would rank here, his U.S. counterpart is Mike Waltz, national security advisor to President Donald J. Trump.
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Of primary interest to our group in this context was the nature of Azerbaijan’s relationship with Iran, a country that clearly has an active interest in radicalizing its neighbors into the same form of Islamic extremism it’s been practicing since 1979.
Hajiyev described his relationship with his Iranian counterpart as cordial, but one in which they sometimes differ.
“We have regular discussions,” he told us. “Sometimes we agree to disagree. In biology you can’t choose your parents, and in geography you can’t choose your neighbors.”
Hajiyev cited three pillars of his country’s relationship with Iran: two differing systems that “coexist side by side,” “noninterference” in each other’s internal affairs, and “good neighborly relations.”
He parsed his words on the topic carefully, but it seemed evident that tension still exists between Iran and Azerbaijan, particularly during recent Iranian military exercises near the Azerbaijani border which did not, as Hajiyev put it, “add to the confidence-based neighborly relationship.”
Hajiyev described his country’s relationship with the United States as a “love story” that began in the early 1990s with immediate support for the newly independent, post-Soviet state.
Still, it has had its ups and downs, mainly because of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia. On this topic, the strong Armenian lobby in the US has its views and Azerbaijan has theirs.
Looking at things from either side it’s easy to spot a lot more nuance than black and white, and it’s also easy to blame much if not most of it on the Soviets, who drew arbitrary borders which for some reason included hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenias in Azerbaijan’s territory. Yet, the Armenian lobby, due to a large expat population in states like California, seems to drive much of the foreign policy towards Azerbaijan.
Hajiyev expressed frustration that the US withheld direct aid to his country in the early 90’s in response to their blockade against Armenia during the first Nagorno-Karabakh War while seemingly ignoring the fact that Armenia took a fifth of Azerbaijan’s territory and held it for decades thereafter.
Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which legislated the withholding of aid, was opposed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, but was used by the administration of President Joe Biden in response to Azerbaijan in 2023 retaking territories it had lost during the first war with Armenia, a move they strongly feel was justified. (To this day they are still in the painstaking process of removing the thousands of landmines placed there by Armenia, many of which were placed as a purposeful trap against civilians, including in cemeteries.)
Azerbaijan’s relations with the United States experienced a “hard time during the Biden and Blinken administration,” Hajiyev said. “We were not appreciated well.”
It was clear that Azerbaijan was hoping for a reset under Trump.
Interestingly, Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, supported Trump’s election over then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He was quoted in Azerbaijani media outlets as wanting better bilateral relations with Washington.
During Trump’s first term, Aliyev stated there was “no issue in US-Azerbaijan relations,” adding that “the main mistake of the Biden administration regarding Azerbaijan was that [it] sacrificed US-Azerbaijan relations for US-Armenia relations.”
Hajiyev pointed to the fact that his country, to much criticism in the Muslim world, allowed U.S. military aircraft to cross its airspace and into Afghanistan after 9/11 and was the last military to officially leave more than two decades later, staying at Kabul’s airport to protect civilians even after American troops left.
He also stressed Azerbaijan’s longtime friendship and support of Israel despite regional sentiment against it.
“The Abraham Accords [during Trump’s first term] started with Azerbaijan,” Hajiyev quipped because his country “established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1991. We are ready to spread the values of the Abraham Accords.”
It was clear during our visit, and particularly our conversation with Hajiyev, that Azerbaijan is committed to keeping Islamic extremism at bay and maintaining a tolerant society where all religions can coexist.
The country’s secular leadership also recognizes that they can’t just let radicalized clerics, particularly of the Shia variety, preach jihad unopposed. To that end, they have repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to investigate and even arrest Islamic leaders who go too far.
“Securialism is in the DNA of the Azerbaijani people,” he told us, and after visiting there and talking to many other people along the way, that truly seems to be the case. It’s a place where Jews have lived largely unpersecuted for thousands of years, where Christian churches like Vineyard Church, which we visited, thrive, where it’s not uncommon to find Sunni and Shia muslims going to the same mosque.
“Islamic cultures are different,” Hajiyev said. “Azerbaijan’s brand is open to other civilizations and cultures.”
It’s tolerant, sure, but the good kind, not the woke kind. And it’s super rare in the Islamic world.
As someone told me on an off-record basis, there are only two kinds of Islamic countries - those ruled with some sort of authoritarian-style and those ruled by Sharia law. Some have criticized Azerbaijan as having aspects of the former, but if that’s the case it’s a soft one, and in all fairness probably a necessary one as well.
For his part, and the part of the leadership he works for and with, Hajiyev sees Azerbaijan as an “example” to show that it’s “possible for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to live side by side and also contribute to the development of the particular society and country.”
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