Saving Ukraine shouldn’t mean greenlighting genocide
Michael Rubin
Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev relishes humiliating Washington.
He berates American diplomats on state television while he buys others with lucrative post-retirement gigs. Even more than Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and China, he buys influence in Washington, and has his oil partner BP do likewise in London.
AUSTRALIA IS WEAK LINK ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RECOGNITION
Some of the influence is legal and above board, but in Washington, at least, most is under the table.
Azerbaijan or its cutouts offer gifts and luxury trips to think tank scholars, former congressmen, and celebrities. He promotes his own ties to Israel not because he likes the Jewish state but rather because he wants their weapons and cynically believes Israel can win him friends in America.
Policymakers make the same mistake they once did with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when they allowed wishful thinking about what they wanted Turkey to trump any honest assessment of Erdogan’s cynicism and behavior.
In September 2020, as campaign antics distracted Washington, Aliyev — backed by both Turkish Special Forces and F-16 pilots and Israeli drones and intelligence — launched a surprise attack on the Armenian-populated Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.
American policymakers like to compartmentalize and believe every administration begins with a blank slate, but this is a particularly American conceit. Linkages exist. Russian President Vladimir Putin noted the United States’s inaction as he considered a similar operation against Ukraine.
Azerbaijan’s actions also challenged both the State Department and Congress: Under U.S. law, Azerbaijan cannot receive U.S. military or foreign assistance unless the White House can certify that it eschews military force to solve its disputes with Armenia.
Yet, since the war, Aliyev has not only repeatedly promised to resolve through force what he failed to achieve diplomatically, but he has also threatened to drive his forces all the way to Armenia’s capital Yerevan. For the last five months, Azerbaijan has blockaded and sought to starve Nagorno-Karabakh into submission. In recent days, Azerbaijan has built border posts to block the Lachin Corridor, a blatant violation of the 2020 ceasefire that Aliyev signed.
On April 19, dozens of senators and congressmen, including such prominent figures as Senators Bob Menendez and Cory Booker, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. Adam Schiff, met to commemorate the 108
th
anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. They swore never again. So did Biden himself in a White House statement five days later.
Yet, senior Biden aides quietly say that the American interest requires ignoring the law. Specifically, they argue that arming Azerbaijan is crucial to the Ukraine fight, given logistical and intelligence cooperation that Azerbaijan provides the Pentagon and CIA. To ignore the fungibility of money, if not Azerbaijan’s actual diversion of weapons, is naïve, especially as Azerbaijan ratchets up ethnic cleansing and attacks its neighbor.
The White House and State Department parries such concern in two ways. First, they argue winning in Ukraine might be the prime imperative. Second, they say the United States has never had a one-size fits all foreign policy.
Both arguments are nonsense. Winning Ukraine might be important, but it does not require throwing other democracies under the bus.
If Washington truly wanted to advance Ukraine’s freedom, it might crack down upon Azerbaijani assistance to Russia sanctions evasion. If Aliyev is truly in the Western camp, it will not try to force Washington and Moscow into a bidding war for his affections, Erdogan-style.
Should Biden’s team believe both Armenian democracy, its independence, and Nagorno-Karabakhs’ thousand-year-old Armenian community is the price to pay for Azerbaijani cooperation, Ukraine may be the least of Biden’s concerns. The precedent of allowing atrocities, genocide, and disregard of signed agreements is something every revisionist, rejectionist, and rogue regime now watches.
Just as the original Armenian Genocide inspired Hitler, what happens in Armenia today won’t stay in Armenia. Biden’s failure to stand up on Section 907 sanctions signals China it can eradicate the Uyghurs and to Turkey that the U.S. will overlook the annexation of northern Cyprus or the ethnic cleansing of Kurds and Yezidis.
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Ukraine’s victory can come without opening a Pandora’s Box of war and genocide across the Middle East and Asia.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.