Azerbaijan’s Role In Multipolarity

Putin’s Important Trip

President Putin’s visit to Azerbaijan to meet with his counterpart Ilham Aliyev has drawn attention to this South Caucasus state’s role in the emerging Multipolar World Order. It’s their third face-to-face meeting since the start of this year after Aliyev visited Moscow in April and then the two leaders met on the sidelines of last month’s SCO Summit in Astana. This important trip is also Putin’s first to Azerbaijan in six years, during which time the region and the world have become totally different places.

Changes In The South Caucasus

The brief war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in late 2020 saw Baku liberate a large part of its western regions that were previously under Yerevan’s occupation. About that, relevant UNSC Resolutions had called on Armenia to withdraw its military forces from there, but Armenia claimed that the combatants were just local separatists. Russia had earlier tried convincing Armenia to agree to a deal that would prevent war with Azerbaijan, but its pro-Western Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan refused to listen.

That phase of this conflict ended with a Moscow-mediated ceasefire in November 2020 that included the deployment of Russian peacekeepers to Karabakh. Its ninth clause also called for creating a trans-Armenian corridor connecting Azerbaijan with its Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which would be under the control of the FSB’s Border Guards Service. Russia envisaged that this project would improve ties between the warring parties, foster regional integration, and promote multipolarity.

Pashinyan, who came to power in 2018 during the Western-backed “Velvet Revolution”, shortly thereafter refused to abide by these terms and began speeding up his country’s pivot towards the US. Azerbaijan eventually launched a successful one-day anti-terrorist operation last September that led to the complete liberation of its territory. Russian peacekeepers then withdrew while Armenia suspended its participation in the CSTO on the false pretext that Moscow was an unreliable military ally.

It was around that time that ties between Azerbaijan and the West deteriorated. The powerful ultra-nationalist Armenian lobby in the EU and the US, particularly in France and California, falsely alleged that Azerbaijan had “ethnically cleansed” its western region’s Armenian minority with the tacit approval of Russian peacekeepers. This led to the passing of a hostile resolution by the European Parliament, Baku’s busting of a Western-funded infowar ring, and a fresh Western military-strategic focus on Armenia.

Regarding the last-mentioned, this took the form of French arms sales to Armenia and another round of joint US-Armenian military exercises, both of which also alarmed Russia. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the first of “provoking another spiral of military confrontation in the South Caucasus” while claiming that the second “will only fuel the conflict potential existing in the region”. The context is that Armenia has thus far refused to sign a comprehensive peace treaty with Azerbaijan.

This sequence of events suggests that the West (specifically the US and France as operating under the influence of the powerful ultra-nationalist Armenia lobby) wants to turn Armenia into their regional bastion for dividing-and-ruling the South Caucasus through the threat of another war. As Armenia continues surrendering its sovereignty to the West, Azerbaijan is moving in the opposite direction of comprehensively strengthening it, including through the cultivation of strategic ties with Russia.

Azerbaijan’s Balancing Acts

Azerbaijan’s approach towards Russia has been impressively pragmatic, especially since the start of the special operation. Baku hasn’t condemned Moscow at the UNGA nor has it imposed sanctions or armed Kiev despite immense Western pressure. Aliyev respects his country’s Russian minority and hasn’t curtailed their language rights nor repressed the Orthodox Church. To the contrary, new Russian schools have been opened in Azerbaijan and believers can worship freely in this majority-Muslim country.

Aliyev appreciates Russia’s importance in the emerging Multipolar World Order within which he’s planning for Azerbaijan to play a crucial connectivity role. Its geostrategic location enables it to simultaneously facilitate north-south trade through the North-South Transport Corridor as well as east-west trade across what’s known as the Middle Corridor. Azerbaijan must therefore balance between all relevant actors if it wants to implement this grand strategic goal.

This imperative explains why Azerbaijan still retained close ties with Russia even during the downturn of Russian-Turkish ties over Syria a decade ago. NATO-member Turkiye has been Azerbaijan’s mutual defense ally since June 2021’s Susha Declaration, but Turkiye itself has also begun practicing an equally pragmatic approach towards Russia under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in recent years. Both countries are also very concerned about the West’s growing ties with their mutual Armenian rival.

Balancing relations with Israel and Iran has proven to be more difficult than with Russia and Turkiye. Azerbaijan recognizes Israel but still supports the creation of an independent Palestinian state in line with relevant UNSC Resolutions. Iran views their relations with suspicion, however, as some within its policymaking establishment appear to lend credence to unconfirmed reports over the years of secret Israeli bases (both air and intelligence) in Azerbaijan.

As regards Azerbaijani-Iranian relations, they’ve remained cordial but have had their ups and downs. A large part of their dynamism is due to Azerbaijani suspicions that Iran never got over the country’s Russian Imperial-era separation from the erstwhile Persian Empire and is trying to subvert it from within through alleged support of certain groups in order to turn the country into a proxy state. For its part, Iran suspects that Azerbaijan supports separatism in Iran’s majority-Azeri northern regions.

Despite these mutual suspicions, work is underway for Iran to facilitate trade between Azerbaijan and its Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic via a new bridge across the Aras River, which could function as an alternative to the trans-Armenian corridor that Yerevan continues refusing to implement. Iran has criticized the aforesaid project, but this is likely due to its cynical interests in decelerating the pace of Armenia’s pro-Western pivot and becoming the gatekeeper of trade between Azerbaijan’s two parts.

Azerbaijan’s Role In Multipolarity

The insight that was shared thus far helps inform observers of Azerbaijan’s role in the emerging Multipolar World Order. As can be seen, Aliyev believes in pragmatically balancing between pairs of rivals – Russia/West, Israel/Iran, and previously Russia/Turkiye – with a view towards reaping mutual benefits that aren’t at anyone else’s expense. This approach closely resembles Russia’s own with the exception of how it was forced to finally defend itself from the West after that vector of its balancing act failed.

At present, Azerbaijan simultaneously serves as: Russia’s gateway to Iran and India; those two’s to Russia; Turkiye’s gateway to the Central Asian Republics and China; and those two’s to Turkiye. Its relations with the EUand Israel are mostly energy-centric since Azerbaijan exports oil and gas to them, while the ones that it has with the US were earlier driven by investment-related interests. Ties with Israel remain strong, but they’re rapidly deteriorating with the US and its European vassals, especially France.

In fact, France recently accused Azerbaijan of funding separatists in its de facto South Pacific colony of New Caledonia that was the scene of recent unrest brought about by Paris’ controversial electoral changes there. Azerbaijan denied any role in those events but there’s no doubt that the “Baku Initiative Group” that it assembled of France’s remaining de facto colonies greatly perturbs Paris. In Baku’s defense, this is an asymmetrical response to Paris’ support of Yerevan and former Karabakh separatists.

The false narrative that the Mainstream Media concocted of Azerbaijan ethnically cleansing its Armenian minority and the false credence that Western politicians lent to it is another fault line in Azerbaijani-Western ties. The innuendo is that majority-Muslim Azerbaijan is killing Christians and is thus supposedly another front in the “clash of civilizations”, but the reality is that Azerbaijan is one of the most secular majority-Muslim countries in the world and is closely partnered with Orthodox-majority Russia.

Intercommunal relations within Azerbaijan are a model for all Global South countries and speak to Aliyev’s truly multipolar worldview. In a sense, Azerbaijan has come to serve as a point of convergence between the Russian and Turkic Worlds. This can enable it to mitigate latent competition between the Ankara-led “Organization of Turkic States” (OTS) and the Moscow-led CSTO in Central Asia of the sort that observers like the Valdai Club’s Anna Machina hinted at earlier this month.

Azerbaijan’s role in Eurasian affairs, both in terms of facilitating trade ties and averting the scenario of OTS-CSTO rivalry in Central Asia, would be enhanced upon partnering with BRICS. Its Ambassador to Moscow recently declared his country’s interest in joining, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had earlier clarified that no new members will be admitted anytime soon. Even so, Azerbaijan can still participate in the group via the “BRICS-Plus”/”Outreach” format that it’s expected to be invited to join.

Concluding Thoughts

The public outcome of Putin’s trip was that they signed six documents: three agreements on food safety, plant protection and quarantine, and healthcare and medicine; and three memoranda of agreement on labor inspections, climate change, and mutual investments. Putin also said that he wants to mediate an Azerbaijani-Armenian peace treaty and announced plans for creating a Russian-Azerbaijani university in Baku while Aliyev revealed that they analyzed the global energy market.

These results aren’t important enough for Putin to travel abroad though, but their joint statement sheds light on what else they discussed and are likely planning for the future. It broadly concerns the direction of bilateral ties, particularly economic, as well as Russian support for Azerbaijan enhancing its role in the SCO and joining BRICS. Their leaders also discussed current regional and international issues, which is a euphemism for the evolving world order.

It was therefore arguably the case that Putin’s trip also advanced interests other than those that were disclosed as suggested by their joint statement. The insight from this analysis suggests that the real purpose was to synergize their relations in order to jointly accelerate multipolar processes in Eurasia. He and Aliyev see eye-to-eye on the future world order due to the Azerbaijani leader turning his country into a shining example of a sovereign state whose policies embody the best trends of the times.