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 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps 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.
Then there is Russia. In December 2024, Russian air defenses shot down a civilian Azerbaijan Airlines jet, killing 38, and Moscow spent most of a year refusing to own it before Putin finally conceded responsibility. Last year, Russia launched massive cyberattacks on Azerbaijani government websites. And the Kremlin’s loudest voices have stopped pretending: state TV host Vladimir Solovyov has threatened the Caucasus and Central Asia with “special military operations,” the very phrase Moscow uses for Ukraine, while ideologue Aleksandr Dugin — often called “Putin’s brain” — declared there can be no sovereignty in the post-Soviet space, Azerbaijan and Armenia included.
We could, of course, assume the Russians never act on what they announce out loud. Ukraine might have a comment on that.
This is the context Rubin omits, and it is what explains Azerbaijan’s shopping list. As I have detailed for the Turan Research Center, a significant share of what Baku has acquired since 2020 — coastal radars, naval drones, electronic-warfare suites, layered air defense, maritime surveillance — has no plausible use against a landlocked Armenia with no navy and no coastline. These are the tools of littoral defense and maritime denial in the Caspian, where Azerbaijan’s offshore energy and the trans-Caspian Middle Corridor lie exposed to Iranian pressure.
Above all, the invasion thesis ignores what Azerbaijan would have to throw away to attempt it. Baku now enjoys unprecedented relations with the United States. Its partnership with Israel, Washington’s closest Middle East ally, runs deep, from years of defense and intelligence cooperation to energy ties that make Azerbaijan one of Israel’s leading oil suppliers. Netanyahu’s own office has called for a “strong foundation for trilateral collaboration” binding Israel, Azerbaijan, and the U.S. In January, Baku joined Trump’s Board of Peace as a founding member, seated beside Armenia. And it was at the White House, alongside Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, that Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev signed the August 2025 framework that lent its name to the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity corridor. A country squeezed by two predatory powers needs the West more than ever — and a cornered, rational state does not torch its only lifeline for territory it has already recovered.
That territory is Karabakh: internationally recognized as Azerbaijani, occupied for three decades by Armenian separatists whose statelet is not even recognized by Armenia. Pashinyan himself has said repeatedly that the land is Azerbaijan’s. And as his own “Real Armenia” logic implies, clinging to it cost Armenia dearly: the frozen conflict was Moscow’s leverage, the lever that kept Yerevan and Baku alike tethered to Russia as indispensable “mediator.” Letting go of Karabakh is how Armenia began letting go of Russia.
Which points to the irony at the heart of Rubin’s argument. If he wants to find the power actually menacing Armenia, he should look north, not east. In the weeks before Armenia’s June elections, it was Putin, not Aliyev, that warned Yerevan it was courting a “Ukraine scenario.” Moscow, not Baku, that threatened to cut its gas and expel it from the Eurasian Economic Union, recalled its ambassador over Armenia’s drift toward Europe, and ran a covert campaign to sink Pashinyan and rescue the pro-Russian opposition. That is what coercion of Armenia looks like, and it does not come from Azerbaijan.
So no — Azerbaijan is not arming for a war of conquest. It is arming to survive between two neighbors who would rather it not exist, and to keep open the corridor that ties it and the West to Central Asia. Far from threatening American interests, Baku has bound its future to them: on the corridor, on countering Iran, on Israel, and at the table of Trump’s signature peace initiative. Washington has few more aligned partners in this part of the world. Waiving Section 907 — better yet, repealing it — is no reward to an aggressor; it is the overdue end of a Cold War relic that hobbles the U.S.’s hand with one of its most useful partners on Iran’s northern flank.
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center, which is hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based Yorktown Institute.