If Trump believes in Azerbaijan-Armenia peace, why does Baku want weapons?

On June 1, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev posted a framed order President Donald Trump gave him waiving Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act. Essentially, Trump’s waiver allows Azerbaijan to purchase American weaponry.

In 1992, Congress passed the Freedom Support Act to help the newly independent states that emerged from the Soviet Union’s collapse build their capacity and transition to democracy. At the time, Azerbaijani forces were leading pogroms against Armenians across Azerbaijan and seeking to ethnically cleanse Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous Armenian region that Josef Stalin had assigned to Azerbaijan. The Senate wrote into the law a provision that banned U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan but enabled a presidential waiver.

For much of its first decade, Section 907 remained in force, and Azerbaijan received little direct support. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush issued an ultimatum: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he told a Joint Session of Congress. Heydar Aliyev, the former Soviet KGB officer and Central Committee member who had taken the reins of power in Azerbaijan in a slow-motion coup against the backdrop of outrage he incited after false rumors of a “genocide” in the tiny village of Khojaly, was savvy. He told Bush he stood with him, then lobbied for a waiver to Section 907. Behind the scenes, for anyone dedicated enough to follow the money, Aliyev was equally aligned with Russia and Iran. When Heydar died and left power to his son Ilham, the younger Aliyev kept the two-faced policy.

The sine qua non of the waiver was the State Department’s certification that Azerbaijan would not use its weaponry against Armenia. On Sept. 14, 2023, Yuri Kim, the acting assistant secretary of state, testified in Congress that the United States would not tolerate any Azerbaijani aggression against Nagorno-Karabakh. Just five days later, Azerbaijani forces stormed into the region, dynamiting churches, sandblasting ancient Armenian inscriptions, bulldozing graveyards, beheading old men on video, and ethnically cleansing 120,000 Armenians. The State Department should have been embarrassed: Ilham Aliyev deliberately humiliated it. Trump later took to TruthSocial to declare, “Kamala Harris did NOTHING as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced in Artsakh.” He promised to “protect persecuted Christians,” “stop the violence and ethnic cleansing,” and restore peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Trump has advanced the peace process, and on Aug. 8, 2025, he invited Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan to the White House to sign a peace agreement. Nevertheless, the Azerbaijani Army continues to occupy almost 100 square miles of undisputed Armenian land. On May 26, 2026, Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefly visited Yerevan to discuss Trump’s peace corridor connecting two parts of Azerbaijan through southern Armenia.

The question Congress should ask, and Trump and Rubio should answer, is this: If the Azerbaijan-Armenia peace agreement is as water-tight and complete as they claim, why does Azerbaijan need advanced American weaponry? Who would Aliyev use it against? The occupation of Armenian land provides a strong hint. The danger is if Aliyev humiliated the State Department once, why would he not do so twice, if only to posture before his domestic audience?

Perhaps Rubio and Azerbaijan’s partisans might whisper about how Azerbaijan needs weapons to fight Iran. But this, too, does not pass the smell test. For all its talk about the necessity of a corridor across Armenia, Azerbaijan has already built a corridor through Iran through which it directs its trade. Under Aliyev’s stewardship, Azerbaijan’s trade with the Islamic Republic has surpassed Armenia’s trade with Iran. Nor does Azerbaijan need the weaponry to counter Russia. After all, Aliyev’s policy toward Russia revolves around helping the Kremlin evade sanctions, not holding it to account for Ukraine.

Something is amiss in the Caucasus. Countries committed to peace and tolerance neither occupy their neighbor nor ethnically cleanse Christian minorities. Countries that have America’s back do not trade with Iran or launder money for Russia. Make no mistake: By waiving 907, Trump and Rubio are not protecting Christians. They are repeating the worst mistakes of President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.