President Donald Trump’s move last week toward bringing Azerbaijan into the Abraham Accords—Washington’s signature initiative to normalize relations between Israel and Muslim nations—no doubt pleased many foreign policy elites. But for conservatives and realists, this isn’t progress; it’s peril.
Israel and Azerbaijan, of course, are entitled to their strategic alliance. Yet there is no conceivable U.S. interest that would justify investing diplomatic capital—and taxpayer dollars—to formalize a partnership that not only functions without America but often functions ruthlessly. U.S. involvement would reward an alliance between two governments whose attacks on ancient Christian communities are already subsidized by American aid.
Israel and Azerbaijan do not need Trump to introduce them. Their alliance is deep-running: Azerbaijan shares Israel’s hostility toward Iran, offers Jerusalem intelligence cooperation and a geographic foothold at Iran’s borders, and buys around 70 percent of its advanced arms from Israel, according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Israel, in turn, imports at least 40 percent of its oil from Azerbaijan. These close economic ties have continued uninterrupted throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and its 12-day war against Iran.
It’s unclear what value Azerbaijan’s inclusion in the Abraham Accords would add, given that bilateral ties already dwarf Israel’s relations with original signatories like the UAE or Bahrain. One explanation may be that Trump, having failed to deliver peace in Ukraine or the broader Middle East, sees this as the lowest of low-hanging fruit: a staged White House handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to tout as a “Muslim-Jewish peace accord.”
But no vital U.S. interest justifies elevating Azerbaijan’s diplomatic status. Beyond the absurdity of brokering peace between longtime allies, Azerbaijan’s importance to America is marginal. Its energy exports matter far more to Europe, yet even there, Baku’s gas can replace at best four percent of Russian supplies—hardly the lifeline Brussels imagines.
Azerbaijan’s primary pitch in Washington, amplified by neoconservative pro-Israel groups, has been its role as an anti-Iran bulwark. While useful to Israel, this should be irrelevant to U.S. strategy, since Iran poses no threat to the American homeland and has been willing to resolve nuclear disputes with the U.S. diplomatically. At a time when America should be extricating itself from Middle Eastern quagmires to focus on China, its only peer competitor, seeking new theaters for conflict with Iran is the definition of strategic malpractice.
The human costs of the Israel-Azerbaijan partnership, however, are truly indefensible. Recently, political commentator Ana Kasparian—herself Armenian-American—told Tucker Carlson that Israel armed Azerbaijan to erase the Armenian people from Karabakh. She referenced the decades-long conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a predominantly Armenian region legally part of Azerbaijan. After Azerbaijan’s decisive 2023 victory, the world witnessed scenes of mass exodus: Armenian Christians choosing to burn their own homes rather than surrender them, ancient churches being desecrated, and over 100,000 people fleeing under military pressure. Freedom House confirmed this as ethnic cleansing—enabled by Israeli-supplied drones and surveillance tech.
Here’s where U.S. policy becomes complicit: America sends Israel $3.8 billion annually in military aid under a memorandum of understanding, and spent $17.9 billion on aid to Israel in the year following October 2023. While U.S. law (in particular, Section 907 of the 1992 Freedom Support Act) restricts direct arms sales to Azerbaijan (even if waived by past presidents, starting with George W. Bush in the context of the “war on terror”)—Israel faces no such constraints. As Americans fund and equip Israel’s military, Israel sells Azerbaijan Harop “suicide drones” and Orbiter surveillance systems—weapons deployed against Armenians. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz bluntly noted, “Israel’s fingerprints are all over the ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh.”
What compounds this scandal is the cheerleading from Christian leaders in the U.S. In 2019, a delegation of evangelical pastors, led by Jewish rabbi Marc Schneier, visited Azerbaijan to promote “interfaith dialogue” with Aliyev, despite Baku’s decades of state-sponsored anti-Armenian rhetoric. In 2025, after the ethnic cleansing, the president of the U.S. Congress of Christian Leaders (an evangelical group) met Aliyev in Davos. Such visits inevitably yield PR puff pieces about Azerbaijan’s “tolerance,” even as it mocked the slaughter of Armenians by opening a (now-shuttered) “military trophies park,” which featured “ghoulish displays of helmets and caricatured mannequins of Armenian soldiers,” according to Eurasianet.
This hypocrisy isn’t confined to the Caucasus. In 2023, Israel struck the Church of Saint Porphyrius, one of the oldest standing Christian churches, killing 18. Last month, it attacked Gaza’s sole Catholic church, killing three and wounding the parish priest. The evangelical leaders’ silence on Karabakh mirrors their muted response to Gaza’s Christian casualties—exposing a selective defense of religious freedom.
True conservatism demands consistency. Conservatives believe in religious freedom, fiscal responsibility, and an America First foreign policy—backing the Israel-Azerbaijan alliance violates all three principles.
Bringing Azerbaijan into the Abraham Accords would solve nothing. America cannot credibly champion religious liberty while indirectly funding the displacement of Christians. It is strategically myopic and, for those who value moral clarity, politically untenable.
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