Here are the full comments that I gave to Bizim.Media’s Tehran Orucoglu in response to his inquiry about the reasons behind the US’ religious blacklisting of Azerbaijan and its possible consequences.
The State Department’s so-called “religious watchlist” is nothing but a political tool designed to manipulate the public’s perceptions about those countries, the purpose of which is to have this serve as the pretext for threatening them with sanctions if they don’t enact policy concessions on other issues. In Azerbaijan’s case, the country practices a fiercely independent foreign policy, which America dislikes because it prevents Azerbaijan from ever becoming its or any other country’s vassal.
Ties between these two have been troubled since the 2020 war and last September’s one-day anti-terrorist operation due to the influence of the powerful Armenian diaspora on the formulation of American policy towards Azerbaijan. This lobby has misled policymakers into thinking that their country’s objective interests are best served by taking a partisan stance in support of Armenia instead of continuing to balance between it and Azerbaijan like it’s been doing for the past few decades.
Azerbaijan’s policy of pursuing its previously occupied territories’ liberation, ideally by peaceful means but without ruling out military ones, never changed. What has changed, however, is that this was finally completed after last month’s one-day anti-terrorist operation. The resultant dismantlement of the foreign-imposed separatist entity on Azeri soil enraged the Armenian lobby, which promptly leveraged all their agents of influence to mislead American policymakers about the region.
To that end, they falsely claimed that a so-called “ethnic cleansing” and even a “genocide” were being carried out despite Azerbaijan promising to protect its Armenian minorities’ rights. Nevertheless, most of them still left for Armenia, where they had already received citizenship. They did this after falling for their diaspora’s fake news about Azerbaijan’s intentions, and the optics of this large-scale and purely voluntary migration were manipulated to make US policymakers think that they “fled for their lives”.
It’s upon this counterfactual basis that the State Department put Azerbaijan on its “religious watchlist”, which serves to pressure both it and those US policymakers who appreciate their countries’ hitherto mutually beneficial partnership. The first will not enact any policy concessions on anything so that dimension of this plot will fail, while the second could be accused of being “anti-Christian” if they speak out in support of Azerbaijan and might thus begin to self-censor to the detriment of bilateral ties.
Excerpts from this article were first published in Azeri at Bizim.Media under the title “ABŞ niyə ölkəmizə qarşı qərəzli addımlarından ƏL ÇƏKMİR? – Amerikalı analitikdən ÖZƏL AÇIQLAMA”.
