Once upon a time, Georgia was the darling of Washington. Presidents Mikhail Saakashvili and George W. Bush had a very close partnership and a major highway from Tbilisi airport was named after the US president. But this ended in 2008 when Russia invaded Georgia and de facto annexed South Ossetia and Abkhazia and Russo-Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili captured the Georgian state in 2012 and nine years later Saakashvili was imprisoned on trumped up charges. In May, the adoption of a copy of a Russian law on ‘foreign agents’ led to the freezing of Georgia’s path to EU membership and the US freezing military cooperation.
Azerbaijan was surprisingly never of interest to the US. In October 1992, the US adopted Amendment 907 of the United States Freedom Support Act banned any direct US aid to Azerbaijan. The irrational ban made Azerbaijan the only former Soviet republic to not receive direct aid from the US for the purposes of supporting economic and political stability in the aftermath of the disintegration of the USSR.
The US was ludicrously punishing Azerbaijan for crimes it never committed. It is the case pogroms were committed by both sides, but Armenia ethnically cleansed upwards of one million Azerbaijani people from Armenia and occupied a fifth of Azerbaijan territory.
Amendment 907 was a victory for the pro-Russian and influential Armenian lobby in the US. During the First Karabakh War, Azerbaijan had blockaded Armenia in an act of self-defence during the bloodiest of conflicts that took place in the former Soviet space.
In October 2001, the US Senate amended this to allow the president to waive Amendment 907. But in November 2023, in response to Azerbaijan’s defence of its internationally recognised territory that had been occupied since 1994, the US Senate adopted a bill suspending military assistance to Azerbaijan, thus again showing the US (like France) was pursuing a biased approach to the South Caucasus.
The US in effect adopted a pro-Armenian position in no way different to that of the Soviet Union and Russia. So-called ‘liberal’ Mikhail Gorbachev sent 26,000 Soviet troops into Baku to suppress protests which killed 150 and 750 wounded innocent civilians. The Soviet and Russian army provided military equipment and mercenaries for Armenia’s military campaign against Azerbaijan.
United States biased approach to the South Caucasus is surprising for two reasons.
The first is Azerbaijan is a growing energy superpower that is assisting Europe in becoming energy independent of Russia. The second is Azerbaijan has had a close security relationship with Israel since the 2000s and a political and military partnership with Turkey for the past decade. Israel is a long-term US ally in the Middle East while Turkey is a NATO member and hosts seven different sized US military bases; one of which at Incirlik hosts nuclear weapons.
Israel and Turkey do not always have warm relations, but they share a common threat from Iran, which is an agent of destabilisation in the Greater Middle East and belligerent in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Iran plotted to assassinate Donald Trump. Last year the Biden administration imposed sanctions on Iran’s IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) for plotting to assassinate former national security adviser John Bolton and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Israel has understood for the last two decades the strategic value of Azerbaijan which borders Iran. Why is the US unable to?
Nevertheless, the US has prioritised Armenia because of a romantic perception of the 2018 revolution that brought Nikol Pashinyan to power. Instead, the US should be prioritising the peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan, based on upholding the territorial integrity of states, which would lead to the normalisation of Armenia’s relations with Turkey and the re-opening of their border which has been closed for three decades.
In a visit earlier this month, USAID head Samantha Power praised Armenia’s reforms and economic growth. She failed to comment, or consider, much of this economic growth is due to Armenia and Georgia assisting Russia to bypass Western sanctions against Russia. Western exports to Armenia since 2022 have increased by over 300% not because its economy is performing well, or Armenians are buying more consumer gods but because these goods are being re-exported to Russia.
Ambassador Powers may be unaware as to why these goods are re-exported without customs duties. This is because Armenia turned away from the European Union in 2013 and joined the Russian led Eurasian Economic Union. Pashinyan has never stated Armenia will withdraw from the Eurasian Economic Union which would be economically devastating as the country relies on remittances from the huge numbers of Armenians working in Russia.
It is welcome news the US has returned to the South Caucasus after being AWOL for such a long period of time. It is bad news the US has not done its homework on the South Caucasus which it continues to approach as in the 1990s in a biased way in favour of only one of three countries.
Dr. Taras Kuzio is a professor of political science at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy and an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He is the author of Genocide and Fascism.
