Thursday, 05 June 2025 00:00

Has the West "Lost" Azerbaijan?

By Robert M. Cutler

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s April 2025 state visit to China, culminating in the signing of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, marks a significant elevation in bilateral relations. The agreement is more than a symbolic gesture: it reflects a strategic convergence across infrastructure, energy, and digital development. It also signals a re-balancing of power in the South Caucasus in response to Western inertia. As China consolidates its position, the question is no longer whether the West leads but whether it has already surrendered the initiative.

BACKGROUND: The Second Karabakh War of 2020 abruptly exposed the obsolescence of entrenched diplomatic frameworks in the South Caucasus, most notably the OSCE Minsk Group. The November 2020 Trilateral Statement that ended the fighting, brokered under Russia’s aegis, signified an incipient restructuring of regional dynamics. Russia positioned itself as the nominal guarantor of stability, installing a contingent of so-called peacekeepers on Azerbaijani territory. Yet this maneuver, driven by residual influence and opportunistic calculus, underscored Moscow’s determination to preserve a semblance of relevance amid shifting fault lines.

While Russia acted following long-established and well-defined interests, the U.S. and the EU hesitated. The initiatives introduced by Western actors, preoccupied with internal crises and other entanglements, lacked coherence, confidence, and strategic vision. The mediation efforts were fragmented and the summits were ad hoc. As a result, the promising diplomatic overtures failed to generate substantive traction. The reactive nature of Western engagement post-2020 contrasts starkly with the proactive moves of regional and other stakeholders having more immediate stakes in the evolving South Caucasus order.

Turkey’s deepening military partnership with Azerbaijan, formalized through the Shusha Declaration of 2021, epitomized pragmatic alignment. Kazakhstan, seizing the moment, accelerated its integration into the emergent Middle Corridor, bolstering East-West logistics networks through the Caspian basin. Concurrently, Gulf states capitalized on Azerbaijan’s post-war stabilization by channeling substantial investments into renewable energy infrastructure, particularly solar and wind projects in the liberated territories. These tangible gestures did not just reflect geoeconomic calculations but represented a recognition of the region’s latent economic potential.

In this context, China modified its traditionally cautious posture in the South Caucasus. Historically deferential to Russia’s informal sphere of influence, Beijing began to reassess the region’s strategic significance following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The resulting destabilization of Eurasian corridors, compounded by Western sanctions and the geopolitical weaponization of supply chains, propelled the South Caucasus from peripheral concern to a central axis in China’s connectivity strategy. This shift was not reflexive or opportunistic. Rather, it reflected China’s measured strategic assessment of the structural transformations in the architecture of Eurasian trade.

By 2022, the foundations for a deepening Sino-Azerbaijani partnership had been firmly established. The signing of a joint declaration on strategic partnership at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in July 2024 signaled a decisive commitment to broaden bilateral economic ties. The two countries’ trade in 2024 was over 20 percent above its 2023 level, reaching nearly US$ 3.74 billion. Chinese enterprises expanded into sectors previously peripheral to their Eurasian ambitions: telecommunications, green energy, and transport logistics. President Ilham Aliyev’s state visit to Beijing in April 2025 did not initiate this trend but rather consolidated it. The Comprehensive Strategic Partnership (CSP) agreement was the logical culmination of sustained and deliberate moves that anchored Azerbaijan’s strategic realignment toward the East.

IMPLICATIONS: The realignment is not mere economic opportunism. Rather, it signals a deeper geopolitical evolution driven by the inadequacy of Western engagement and the region’s preparedness to respond to actors willing to match rhetoric with decisive action. The failure of Western policy is not just about inattentiveness, but also about an inability to grasp the interplay between regional agency, emerging connectivity frameworks, and the geopolitical vacuum created by Russia’s shifting posture. In this unfolding dynamic, Azerbaijan has moved beyond waiting for Western recognition or support. It has instead begun to assert its own role within a rapidly realigning Eurasian order.

For China, Azerbaijan serves as a gateway not only to Europe through the Middle Corridor but also toward the Middle East, reinforcing China’s broader trade architecture and strategic depth in the region. The CSP is not a symbolic gesture. Its scope is broad and consequential, encompassing coordinated industrial development, infrastructure harmonization, technology transfer, and streamlined customs protocols. These measures are underpinned by capital investments and long-term industrial partnerships.

For Azerbaijan, the CSP consolidates a deliberate move to attenuate traditional dependencies on Western and Russian interlocutors. It embodies Azerbaijan’s long-articulated aspirations for economic diversification, substantiated now by tangible capital flows and operational partnerships. The CSP’s provisions span petrochemicals, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, and renewables. Agreements on aerospace and intellectual property signal a strategic depth, eschewing transactional engagement in favor of embedded, systemic collaboration.

The transport dimension alone is reshaping regional dynamics. The Middle Corridor, stretching from China through Kazakhstan, the Caspian basin, and into the South Caucasus and Europe, has demonstrated rapid growth. While still smaller in scale than northern routes traversing Russia, its year-on-year expansion has been notable. A trilateral joint venture among Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia’s rail operators is actively synchronizing digital customs tracking and reducing delivery times to enhance competitiveness.

The Port of Alat, central to Azerbaijan’s maritime logistics, has already undergone substantial upgrades. Cross-border road transport agreements and operational protocols with China, concluded in 2024 and 2025, are streamlining east–west trade flows. China’s formal recognition of Azerbaijan as a "central transit node" underscores the strategic weight of this integration.

The significance of the CSP extends beyond ports and pipelines. Digital infrastructure has emerged as a foundational pillar. Huawei and ZTE, longstanding presences in the region, have solidified their positions through new agreements establishing joint research centers, expanding data infrastructure, and modernizing e-government frameworks. These initiatives are embedding Chinese technological standards into the South Caucasus and positioning Baku as a nascent digital hub.

Energy collaboration has similarly accelerated. China’s Universal Energy is backing the Gobustan solar project, with further discussions ongoing over potential wind energy developments along the Caspian coast. These initiatives are paralleled by an expansion of Chinese soft power, from Confucius Institutes to cultural exchanges and educational programs.

Azerbaijan has not “abandoned” the West. The reality is starker: the West has failed to keep pace with Azerbaijan’s evolving strategic calculus. President Aliyev’s visit to Beijing and the CSP with China are less an embrace of Beijing than a commentary on the chronic insufficiencies of Western engagement. For years, Baku signaled openness to deeper commercial ties, infrastructure investments, and a balanced diplomatic posture. What it often received were half-measures, symbolic gestures, and ideological critiques.

The waning of Western diplomatic leverage in the South Caucasus is not a sudden anomaly. It is the cumulative outcome of incremental miscalculations, fragmentary approaches, and the persistent failure to integrate regional realities into a coherent strategic vision. The 2020 Second Karabakh War marked a decisive inflection point. Azerbaijan’s reintegration of its formerly occupied territories exposed the impotence of frameworks long regarded as the bedrock of resolution efforts. The abrupt reassertion of Azerbaijani territorial sovereignty in 2020, and its completion in 2023, underscored the extent to which Western actors had become disconnected from the region’s evolving dynamics.

Europe’s Global Gateway initiative, though nominally prioritizing the Middle Corridor, remains hesitant and underfunded. The U.S., preoccupied with broader geopolitical contests, has failed to sustain a coherent South Caucasus policy. When attention does surface, it is often filtered through domestic advocacy agendas misaligned with both regional stability and U.S. strategic interests. Thus, under the influence of domestic lobbies, two of the Biden administration’s last acts were to decline to waive Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, which bans direct assistance to the Azerbaijani government, and to sign a bilateral strategic partnership charter with the Armenian government.

CONCLUSIONS: The South Caucasus has shifted from constituting a peripheral zone to a strategic nexus. Capital and influence from East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East are converging upon the region. Turkey, Kazakhstan, and the Gulf states have become active participants in this evolving matrix. Azerbaijan, far from merely serving as a bridge, has assumed the role of architect and builder of new routes. Aliyev’s visit to Beijing is emblematic of this shift. Baku no longer waits for external recognition; it engineers its own relevance.

The West must recognize this not as a defection, but as an adaptation to opportunity over nostalgia. The coming months will be decisive. If the West wishes to remain a meaningful player, it must replace rhetorical overtures with substantive commitments: joint infrastructure ventures, credible support for energy transition, and diplomatic engagement rooted in regional realities rather than encumbered by historical preoccupations.

Azerbaijan’s choice is not between China and the West, but between agency and irrelevance. It has already chosen. The question now is whether the West retains both the capacity—and the will—to respond.

AUTHOR’S BIO: Robert M. Cutler is Director and Senior Fellow, Energy Security Program, NATO Association of Canada. He was for many years a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, Carleton University.

Published in News

By Erica Marat and Johan Engvall

May 12, 2022

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/10/soviet-imperialism-colonialism-ukraine-kazakhstan-georgia-moldova/

Foreign Policy

For many of Russia’s neighbors, the war in Ukraine has accelerated the process of breaking out of Moscow’s orbit and abandoning loyalty to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. While governments from Moldova and Georgia to Kazakhstan are distancing themselves from Putin’s offensive in Ukraine, the war is also prompting a deeper reexamination of the meaning of the past in former Soviet territories. The idea of “brotherly nations” promoted by the Soviets is now overshadowed by the notion that Soviet Russia may have never pursued true equality with its neighbors—not now, nor a century ago when the Soviet empire was established through mass violence.

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is becoming just another neighbor in the eyes of Kazakhs, Georgians, Moldovans, and others.

Several governments have shown greater independence from Moscow than expected. Last month, Kazakhstan declared it wouldn’t hold a military parade to celebrate the Soviet interpretation of its World War II victory. Earlier, Kazakhstan reportedly also refused Russia’s request to supply troops in Ukraine. Both Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan expanded cooperation in rerouting energy supplies to Europe bypassing Russia. As explained by the Kazakh deputy foreign minister, “If there is a new Iron Curtain, we do not want to be behind it.”

The more a country is politically free and allows space for the critical reappraisal of its past, the less its public is likely to support Russia’s regional dominance.

Long-serving Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov spoke out in support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including in Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea. Perhaps due to political pressure from Russia, he was later removed from his position and appointed to another post. Kyrgyzstan’s foreign minister was sacked as well—likely because of insufficient public support of Russia’s war.

In Moldova, which depends on Russian energy supplies and hosts hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, President Maia Sandu said her government is following Russia’s actions in Transnistria with “caution and vigilance.” A few days after the Russian invasion in Ukraine, Moldova applied for European Union membership, along with Georgia and Ukraine. Both Moldova and Georgia face Russian occupation of parts of their territories (Transnistria as well as South Ossetia and Abkhazia, respectively), which they don’t recognize as legitimate.

Acts of everyday resistance to Russia’s war in Ukraine in Central Asia and the South Caucasus vary from small businesses posting “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine!) next to their products and civil society groups collecting humanitarian aid for Ukraine to members of the public wearing yellow and blue: the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The Russian war symbols Z and V are rare or banned by the state.

Seeing the Soviet regime as a colonialist government both unites nations around a joint history of trauma and builds resistance to Russian attempts to subjugate them. Russian modern imperial ambitions in Ukraine or Georgia look offensive in these countries. The more a country is politically free and allows space for the critical reappraisal of its past, the less its public is likely to support Russia’s regional dominance.

In Kazakhstan, a critical look at its history of mass starvation that killed millions of people have now spilled from academic discussions into the public. In Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, historians and activists now openly blame the Soviet regime for purging national elites. In Ukraine, a sharp turn against alignment with Russia in 2014 came as Moscow annexed Crimea and the occupied Donbas.

Reexamining the Soviet past is taking place despite the fact that most international scholarship still sees the Soviet empire as a modernizing power of a backward people, especially in Central Asia. The seeming equality among nations of the empire and its anti-capitalist stance earned a large following among the anticolonial left in both the West and especially in formerly colonized countries throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The war in Ukraine is revealing the human costs of the empire’s expansion today even in the face of grassroots resistance. Like Putin’s increasing control of Russia today, the Soviet system was totalitarian, controlling the everyday lives of its people and superimposing Russian culture on all ethnic groups.

Distancing themselves from a romanticized view of their Soviet pasts, these societies are now generating pressure for political change at home—challenging the type of post-Soviet authoritarian leadership model that has been common across the region and has its roots in totalitarian rule. In the past several years, protesters in Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, and Ukraine demanded reforms to post-Soviet state institutions, such as police and intelligence services that are designed to serve the political elite and not citizens.

Anti-regime collective mobilization is a sign of a more politically engaged society that expects participation in decision-making and free elections. Ukraine’s resistance to Russian occupation is the ultimate example of how domestic pro-democracy mobilization rejects authoritarian rule.

In the face of this tide of new expectations, incumbent autocratic leaders are increasingly in peril. For example, in Russia’s closest ally, Belarus, President Aleksandr Lukashenko only managed to survive a prolonged popular uprising in the fall of 2020 once he received support from Putin. Lukashenko was able to suppress the protests, but the collective grievances of Belarus’s society have not been solved. In the early days of the invasion, Belarusian railway workers sabotaged Russia’s supply of equipment to Ukraine. The brave act damaged Russian logistics, preventing the Kremlin from moving troops and materiel forward.

Kazakhstan’s political setup is similar to Russia’s—a president sits at the top of a pyramid of power, doling out posts and assets to allies in return for loyalty and a cut of the spoils. But following Kazakhstan’s nationwide uprising in January, the country faces the test of transforming into a more representative political system. Despite decades of authoritarianism, citizens mobilized in historic protests to demand better economic opportunities and the end of the president’s unlimited political power. Many in Kazakhstan’s uprising were young people of the same age as the independent state itself. They now see themselves as agents of change, willing to risk more than their parents could stomach.

Moscow’s ability to influence national decision-making processes in former Soviet territories appears to be waning. Despite Moscow’s objections, Russian only remains a state language in Belarus, although it retains the status of an official language in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Azerbaijan switched from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet in the early 1990s while Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan are at different stages of the same transition.

Only four countries have joined the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union, and the intergovernmental military alliance the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) has six members, Russia included. Both of these Russian-led organizations are likely to become ever more unpopular among political incumbents and the public. Even after the CSTO intervention in Kazakhstan in January, which helped President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev secure his hold on power, the Kazakh government has shown greater opposition to Moscow’s war than expected.

Russian political influence is also declining because Russian culture is losing its dominant position and has to compete with other worldviews for the hearts and minds of younger generations. These more diverse generations are formed by domestic as well as foreign influences, whether from Turkey, the Persian Gulf, or Europe. Traditional and nationalist-oriented values tend to resonate in more rural areas while liberal ideas and values are usually concentrated in urban centers. Large pro-Ukraine protests were held in Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moldova. Even in countries like Kyrgyzstan, where the government banned antiwar protests, a few brave activists still filled the streets.

Rather than be pawns that are moved around on the Kremlin’s chessboard, Russia’s neighbors are increasingly turning into active players in the international arena.

Separation from Russia does not necessarily mean these countries will seek a closer alignment with the West. Political incumbents in Central Asia and the South Caucasus may be more inclined to seek closer ties with China and Turkey. Countries that depend on Russia’s political and military support—notably Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—may still show careful support of close ties with Moscow. But even there, political leaders shied away from publicly siding with Putin’s rhetoric of “denazification” in Ukraine. The unpredictable consequences of Russia’s war might leave these states no other choice but to diversify their diplomatic relations.

Rather than be pawns that are moved around on the Kremlin’s chessboard, Russia’s neighbors are increasingly turning into active players in the international arena—and have not hesitated to play external powers against one another to extract maximum benefits. They prefer to maintain ties with many regional powers; Russia is becoming just another neighbor, along with the EU, China, Turkey, and Iran.

In that way, Central Asian countries are becoming more like other countries in Asia and Africa—searching for multilateralism rather than solely attaching themselves to one actor: Russia. The ability of these states to resist Moscow’s pressure to support the invasion of Ukraine would not have been possible without their long-standing efforts to preserve their sovereignty and identity themselves by diversifying their diplomatic alliances.

To understand the effectiveness of Russian power in the former Soviet space, it is no longer sufficient just to know the Kremlin’s intent. Former Soviet colonies are on the verge of breaking away from the last remaining legacies of Soviet rule. The war in Ukraine points at the need to consider countries formerly occupied by the Soviet regime as entities with their own complex domestic processes despite Russia’s efforts to direct and dominate them.

Many citizens of former Soviet states in Central Asia and the South Caucasus now see Russia as a belligerent neighbor engaging in genocidal violence rather than as an historic ally. Time is thus not on the side of Putin’s imperialistic and nationalist crusade to reassert Russia’s exclusive control over its neighboring countries—because Moscow’s neighborhood is no longer a collection of its former colonial subjects.

Published in Staff Publications

Mamuka Tsereteli & James Jay Carafano 

19FortyFive, August 6, 2021

August brings bitter memories, a reminder that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin will press his sphere of influence by any means, no matter how ruthless. If the United States does not want to witness more of Putin’s brutality, America will have to partner more proactively with countries committed to a West whole, free, prosperous and at peace.

On August 7, 2008, Russian tanks rolled into neighboring Georgia under the pretext of supporting South Ossetian separatists. The Georgian villages of the Tskhinvali region were burned down to the ground and ethnically cleansed. Russia imposed a military occupation. The Abkhazia region was occupied as well. To cover up its creeping annexation of foreign territories, Russia formally recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states.

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Published in Staff Publications

What the South Caucasus Should Expect from the Biden Administration

The Biden administration inherited a decade-long uncertainty in US policy towards the South Caucasus. What should the countries of the region expect from the new American administration, in the context of the rapidly changing geopolitical environment in and around the South Caucasus? Should we expect more US engagement or less? Should we expect more security cooperation or less? What about democracy promotion? How will the US policy towards Iran, Turkey, and Russia impact the region?

Our panel of speakers with in-depth knowledge of the Washington policy-making landscape answered these question and more.

Speakers:

Jason Bruder, Former Foreign Relations Committee Staffer and Senior Advisor at Open World
Scott Cullinane, Executive Director, US-Europe Alliance
Claire Kaiser, Director for Strategic Initiatives, McLarty Associates
Mark Simakovsky, Nonresident Senior Fellow, Atlantic Council

Moderator: Svante E. Cornell, Director, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute 

When: Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 12:00-1:15 pm EST

The event was livestreamed on the CACI Facebook page and is now available on YouTube

 
Published in Forums & Events
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