When an Iranian drone struck Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave this spring, Baku responded in two ways: It sent troops to the Iranian border and humanitarian aid across it.
“It was this push and pull, the carrot and the stick,” Ilan Berman, senior vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, told MBN on its Ctrl-F podcast after his return from the Azerbaijani capital.
Baku also sent a private message to Tehran, he said, reminding Iran that Azerbaijan can hurt Iran.
“‘If you guys don’t cut it out, we have levers that we can pull,’” Berman said, characterizing Baku’s message. “‘We can play on the ethnic divisions within your country. You’re worried about a Kurdish uprising, but there’s also the north of the country to worry about.’”
The levers are millions of ethnic Azerbaijanis in Iran’s north. By Berman’s estimate, ethnic Azerbaijanis make up about a quarter of Iran’s 93 million people, more than twice Azerbaijan’s own population. And “a lot of the political leadership” has roots in the north, he said.
“This creates diplomatic connections,” he said, explaining why Azerbaijan can’t simply close the diplomatic door on its neighbor.
“But on the other hand, the vision that the [Azerbaijani] government has created for greater connectivity, for being part of these connectivity projects like the Middle Corridor and TRIPP, better relations with Israel, better relations with the United States, that rubs against closeness with Iran.”
“They would like to stay on the sidelines of what’s happening in Iran,” Berman said, “but they can’t.”
Berman calls Azerbaijan “the northernmost Gulf state.” It’s a former Soviet republic with a majority Shiite population, a secular government, Caspian oil, and good relations with Turkey, Israel and the Trump administration.
He describes “an authoritarian meritocracy” under President Ilham Aliyev, who inherited the office from his father. “This system thinks much more like a dynasty than it does like a democracy,” he said, noting that Moscow takes pains to assure it retains its historic influence there, too.
Azerbaijan’s secularism has its critics. Baku recently restricted the hijab and niqab in schools, drawing pushback from some quarters of the Middle East, Berman said.
The Baku authorities have fostered “a separation of mosque and state, as they would define it,” as a guard against foreign influence, he said.
Since the 1990s, he added, Iran has worried about Azerbaijan’s secular Shiism. “Because it’s not radical, it’s not politicized,” he said. It “may have an influence over the Azerbaijani population of northern Iran.”
In turn, Iran has proselytized among Azerbaijani Shiites so that any religiously inspired separatism affects Azerbaijan instead of Iran.
Azerbaijan’s relationship with Israel is the other irritant for Iran. Azerbaijan fought a brief war with Armenia over the Nagorno-Karabakh ethnic enclave in 2023. It won—“handily,” Berman said—with the help of Israeli drones and high-tech systems, and the two countries agreed to a U.S.-brokered peace deal in Washington in 2025.
“If you’re Iranian and you’re looking north and you see this defense tech and military collaboration, there’s a reason for you to be worried about Azerbaijan becoming a platform for an attack against you,” Berman said.
Berman rejected the idea that Azerbaijan’s relationship with Israel was transactional, based solely on exchanging its oil for Israeli weapons.
“I think it’s deeper than that,” he said. He recalled telling Azerbaijani officials two years ago that Baku would be a natural party to the Abraham Accords. They said no, he said.
“‘We don’t need it because our relationship [with Israel] is so historic, is so broad-based. It’s not just about defense, it’s not just about military, it’s about political alignment,’” he said they responded. “‘We don’t actually need this structure to move our relationship forward. We have a very robust relationship.’”
This stance complicates Azerbaijan’s diplomatic standing in the region. “On the one hand, Turkey has a very adversarial relationship with Israel and a very close relationship with Azerbaijan,” Berman said. “Ankara is worried about this.”
“On the other hand, Iran, which has a tense relationship with Azerbaijan and a terrible relationship with Israel, they’re very worried about this.”
That’s why, in part, Baku has pledged to join no coalition and host no foreign troops. “It’s a reassurance strategy to at least settle the minds of some Iranians,” Berman said.
So far that pledge and the deterrence among Iran’s Azeris have worked, he said, “but … it’s not an indefinite condition.”
Russia ships drones to Iran across the Caspian Sea, close to Azerbaijani territory. A new round of fighting between the U.S., Israel and Iran could put those supply lines in the crosshairs.
“If the war heats up again, if there is a northern front that emerges as a result, it’s going to be very hard for Azerbaijan to sit it out,” Berman said.
His advice for Washington is to stop treating the South Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as separate regions.
“That’s a formulation that benefits Moscow and it benefits Beijing because it keeps these countries separate and not connected,” he said. Russia and China can exert outsized influence when countries feel isolated and weak, he said, but the United States should encourage the region to see itself as a single bloc.
“If you want to see positive economic development and positive political development in these regions,” he said, “think of them as a whole and think of how they can act and to amplify American interest, to amplify Western interest, to promote all the ideas that we care about.”
