After the Second World War, the basis for Washington’s international diplomacy generally followed two paths:  either ideology or realpolitik.   This was especially true for U.S. diplomacy with the newly independent states that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.  It didn’t really matter whether the Democratic or the Republican Party was in power in Washington; ideology almost always prevailed – unless an exception needed to be made now and then when a major U.S. corporation wanted to invest in one or another of the new nations.  

This was especially true for gas and oil companies that saw the potential to earn huge profits in countries bordering the Caspian Sea that the Soviet Union had once made off-limits to the West.  To cite a relevant example from the beginning of the 21^st century, the U.S. government effectively stepped in to ensure that the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline was built to deliver Caspian oil, and eventually natural gas, directly to Europe, thus bypassing Russia and its existing pipeline systems.  That was realpolitik.  And it was implemented almost as much to tweak independent Russia as it was to support the new nations.

The BTC Pipeline, however, was an exception, because ideology usually dominated U.S. foreign policy when dealing with the countries of the Caspian region.  The U.S. government generally kept them at arm’s length because of Washington’s concern about governance and human-rights problems that these countries had inherited from their time in the Soviet Union and, even before that, in the Tsarist Empire.

A new diplomatic door for the Caspian nations opened on September 7, 2013, when China’s Xi Jinping announced in Astana, Kazakhstan, what has come to be known as the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast collection of infrastructure projects, bypassing Russia, that allows Beijing to direct its trade and transport through Central Asia, across the Caspian Sea, through the South Caucasus, and into Türkiye and then onward throughout Europe.  That meant that there were now four major global powers seeking the interests of the Caspian countries:  Russia, China, the United States, and the European Union.  Following a practice that Kazakhstan first enunciated, multi-vector foreign policy, most of the countries of the region kept the interests of these four powers fairly well balanced.

But the world has changed.  Russia’s on-going devastating war against Ukraine and, more recently, a radically new government in Washington have thrown open the doors for the Caspian countries to redefine how they conduct their foreign policies.  

This is especially true for Armenia and Azerbaijan.  Their decades-long conflict over the region of Karabakh came to a close in 2023 when Baku took total control of this region within its own, internationally recognized border that Armenia had long occupied and had declared that if it did not become part of Armenia proper, then it should become an independent nation known as Artsakh.  Also, the White House hosting on August 8 Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to initial a 17-point peace agreement was another important step forward that, probably not incidentally, gave the United States exclusive economic rights in southern Armenia.  Although further work needs to be done to achieve final peace between the two countries, the door has now swung more widely open than ever before in the post-Soviet world for the international integration of these two South Caucasus nations as they firmly stand as truly independent and beholden to none.  To move this process along, there are several fundamental steps that Washington could take.  

One step would be for the U.S. Congress to void Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act that requires an annual waiver for any U.S.-Azerbaijan security cooperation.  This is something that has deeply annoyed Baku for decades.  It is now clearly in Washington’s interests to take this step, simply to show that U.S.-Azerbaijan relations have, indeed, crossed the threshold and that Washington has now, once and for all, closed that door to the past and thrown away the key.  

Another step would be for the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that explicitly and for perpetuity exempts both Azerbaijan and Armenia from being subject to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment of the 1974 Trade Act that was originally passed as a Cold War ideological hammer against the Soviet Union to allow its Jewish citizens to emigrate.  Over the decades, the amendment has been redefined in various ways to make it appropriate for Washington to continue to use it as a diplomatic ideological cudgel against the independent states that emerged from the Soviet Union.

And yet one more step Washington could take would be to develop and to confirm strategic partnerships with both Armenia and Azerbaijan.  Not only would this send a signal to Moscow that the United States has become and will remain more serious about the South Caucasus region, it would also be a message to Azerbaijan’s and Armenia’s southern neighbor, Iran, that the United States, in the spirit of realpolitik, now stands more firmly with Tehran’s northern neighbors than ever before.

These are the three most basic and simple steps that could have profound and long-lasting implications to promote peace and prosperity in the South Caucasus.  The current moment is an ideal time for Washington to act.