What Azerbaijan reveals about Israel’s Strategic environment

The changing distribution of strategic value and how Azerbaijan reveals the strategic opportunities hidden within an interconnected threat environment

Azerbaijan occupies an increasingly unusual position within the contemporary geopolitical landscape. Its external environment has become more volatile: tensions with Iran persist, the regional order in the South Caucasus has changed following the wars of 2020 and 2023, the war in Ukraine has altered calculations surrounding Eurasian energy and connectivity, and Turkey’s regional influence has expanded. Yet Azerbaijan’s strategic relevance has increased during precisely this period.

Its energy infrastructure has acquired greater significance within European diversification efforts. Its geography occupies an important position in east-west and north-south connectivity. Its relationship with Turkey remains foundational, while its partnership with Israel carries particular significance within the wider Iranian security environment. The assets themselves are not new. The strategic environment surrounding them is.

Threats do not merely impose costs on geopolitical systems. Threat and opportunity can be simultaneous properties of the same structural condition. The threat represented by regional instability cannot always be understood without examining the strategic opportunities that instability creates for the states positioned around it.

I. Strategic Revaluation: Geopolitical disruption changes the value of what already exists.

Azerbaijan’s contemporary importance rests largely on infrastructure and relationships developed long before the current period of instability. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, the Southern Gas Corridor and the country’s position within both the Middle Corridor and the International North-South Transport Corridor all predate the war in Ukraine. What changed was how external actors began to assess these assets.

European efforts to diversify energy supplies increased the political significance of Azerbaijani gas infrastructure. The search for greater redundancy in Eurasian connectivity renewed interest in routes crossing the Caspian and South Caucasus. Neither development required Russia to disappear from the region or Azerbaijan to abandon its relationships with Moscow and Tehran. Azerbaijan’s value increased because different actors became less willing to depend exclusively on existing systems.

This distinction matters. Strategic revaluation does not necessarily require a state to acquire new capabilities or change alignment. Sometimes the environment changes around assets that already exist.

II. Strategic Multiplicity: Azerbaijan matters to several systems at once.

Azerbaijan’s position cannot be understood through the conventional language of geopolitical camps. It remains connected to Russia and Iran through north-south transport and trade, while participating in east-west connectivity linking Central Asia, the Caspian, Turkey and Europe. Turkey remains its closest strategic partner. Europe values its energy infrastructure. Israel’s relationship with Baku is shaped substantially by the Iranian security environment. These relationships do not belong to a single geopolitical project.

That is precisely what makes Azerbaijan strategically significant. Different actors approach the same state with different requirements: energy security, connectivity, regional influence, trade, defense cooperation and concerns regarding Iran. Azerbaijan’s strategic relevance is therefore not derived from exclusive alignment with one system, but from its simultaneous relevance across several.

III. The Case for Looking Sideways: Azerbaijan illustrates why geopolitical opportunity cannot always be identified within the theatre in which a threat originates.

Israel’s strategic relationship with Azerbaijan is usually examined through a bilateral or regional lens: Israeli–Azerbaijani cooperation, the Iranian threat, and the security implications of the South Caucasus. Those are legitimate starting points, but they can obscure a more consequential development. Azerbaijan’s position is being shaped simultaneously by strategic processes that neither originated in Israel nor were designed around Israeli interests.

Geopolitical opportunity is often treated as something a state deliberately creates or discovers in response to an immediate threat. Azerbaijan suggests another possibility- an existing relationship may acquire greater strategic utility because developments beyond either partner’s control have changed the environment around it.

For Israel, the relevance of the case therefore lies less in Azerbaijan as a model than in the analytical perspective it offers. A threat centered in one region can alter the strategic significance of relationships, infrastructure and geography elsewhere, including in spaces that initially appear peripheral to the original conflict.

The task is consequently not simply to search for opportunities generated directly by a threat, but to examine how the wider environment surrounding existing strategic relationships is changing. Azerbaijan is one such case, its importance to Israel cannot be separated from the independent forces that have made Azerbaijan more consequential to everyone else.