A leaked draft of the so-called “Azerbaijan Sanctions Review Act of 2024” circulated on Monday ahead of its reportedly planned tabling sometime later this week by Congresswoman Dina Titus, a Democrat from Nevada, whose party is known to be under the influence of the ultra-nationalist Armenian lobby. If approved, it would legally obligate the Biden Administration to determine whether the 41 Azeri officials that are listed thus far engaged in undermining the rule of law and human rights in the country.
Azeri-American ties would never be the same if the US sanctions that country’s officials. They’re already being tested like never before after some congressional representatives lent false credence to the ultra-nationalist Armenian lobby’s lies that Azerbaijan “ethnically cleansed” their co-ethnics from Karabakh. That in turn served as the public pretext for the US to pivot towards Armenia at Azerbaijan’s expense by exploring a comprehensive political and military partnership with Yerevan from September onwards.
The logical culmination of this ongoing trend is for the US to sanction Azeri officials on rule of law and human rights pretexts, which could enjoy bipartisan support seeing as how many Evangelical Republicans have fallen for the fake news alleging that “Muslims genocided Christians in Karabakh”. The real purpose of any such sanctions would be to pressure Azerbaijan into subordinating itself as the US’ “junior partner” in the region below Armenia in America’s envisaged South Caucasus hierarchy.
The US is very upset that its intelligence agencies and their “agents of influence” in Armenia among its ultra-nationalist diaspora and (government-organized) “NGOs” couldn’t succeed in sparking a conflict that was meant to divide-and-rule the region by provoking a Russian-Azeri/Turkish war. They failed so badly that Russian-Azeri relations are now better than at any moment in history, with President Ilhan Aliyev visiting Moscow to meet with his counterpart on the same day that the draft bill leaked.
The latest policy that the US is preparing to promulgate, whose passage can’t be taken for granted even though there’s definitely a chance that it’ll move forward, is premised upon completely false beliefs. These are the assumption that America is the most powerful player in the region, the notion that Azerbaijan lacks the self-respect to confidently defend its objective national interests (including its international reputation), and the US ignoring the fact that sanctions never changed its targets’ policies.
In view of the aforementioned, taking the US’ ongoing foreign policy trend to its logical culmination will fail to achieve the desired goals. It’s counterproductive from the perspective of America’s objective national interests since it amounts to ruining previously excellent relations with Azerbaijan. Nothing of tangible significance is achieved by doing so, with the only result being that the ultra-nationalist Armenian diaspora’s influence in the halls of Congress will keep growing to the detriment of US interests.
