Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev (AA File Photo)
Ilham Aliyev’s speech at the 8th Congress of the New Azerbaijan Party on Oct. 2 was noteworthy not only in terms of Azerbaijan’s domestic political agenda, but also for understanding Baku’s foreign policy line.
The most widely discussed parts of the speech were the messages directed outward. His statements that “no one should interfere in our affairs,” that “they should not stick their noses into our way of life,” that “we do not need a patron,” that “we have never played a double game,” and that Azerbaijan had acquired its weapons using its own resources quickly gave rise to various interpretations. In particular, on social media in Türkiye, interpretations that these remarks were directed at Ankara came to the fore.
However, there is an important question here: Should we read a political speech solely through the words themselves, or should we also consider the developments that immediately preceded those words?
When Aliyev’s speech is considered as a whole, a broader framework emerges. The president was explaining Azerbaijan’s determination to make independent decisions, its position against external interference, and the country’s understanding of security. He regards ideological security as important as physical security and emphasizes that, particularly in the age of the internet, cyberattacks and artificial intelligence, externally directed influences constitute a new area of risk for the state.
Yet in politics, chronology is often at least as important as the words themselves.
Just three days before Aliyev’s Oct. 2 speech, on Sept. 29, an Azerbaijani delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Shahin Mustafayev was in Tehran. Mustafayev met with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and subsequently held a meeting with Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. During the meetings, relations between the two countries, regional developments and, in particular, security issues in the context of attacks against Iran were discussed. The Azerbaijani side also explicitly stated that its territory had not been used against Iran.
This meeting does not mean that Azerbaijan-Iran relations are poor. On the same day, the two sides spoke of friendship, good-neighborly relations and cooperation in the fields of economic and trade relations, transportation and energy. However, Aliyev’s speech that followed immediately afterward led some of his remarks to be read within a different political context.
Especially when Rezaei’s statements in previous years regarding Azerbaijan’s security policy, its relations with Israel and the United States, the Zangezur Corridor and regional balances are taken into consideration, Baku’s emphasis that “we make our own decisions” becomes more meaningful.
Aliyev’s statement that “we bought all our weapons with our own money; no one gave us weapons for free” is also noteworthy in this context. The emphasis that Azerbaijan built its security and defense capabilities with its own resources can be seen as a direct response to claims of external patronage or political tutelage.
Likewise, the message that “there are two superpowers: the United States and China. We have strategic agreements with both” can be read as a foreign-policy formula conveying that Azerbaijan is not a political extension of any particular center of power. Baku’s approach is not to take sides with one party, but to establish relations with different centers of power on the basis of its own interests.
Relations between Azerbaijan and Türkiye are not limited to day-to-day political statements. The alliance between the two countries has been institutionalized in the fields of defense, energy, transportation and security. Therefore, stronger grounds would be needed to regard the message that “we do not want outside interference” as a warning directed specifically at Türkiye.
Another important aspect of the Oct. 2 speech was the emphasis that Azerbaijan does not “play a double game.” This statement summarizes the foundation of Baku’s foreign-policy approach in recent years: working simultaneously with different centers of power while not allowing any of them to become decisive over Azerbaijan’s domestic and foreign-policy decisions.
For this reason, reading the speech simply as a “message to Türkiye” narrows the picture too much, in my view. Likewise, it would not be accurate to link all of the harsh statements to a single country. The broader thesis put forward by Aliyev is this: Azerbaijan now wants to act on the basis of its own strength, its own decisions and its own national interests.
Yet in politics, sometimes the address of a message is revealed not so much by the message itself as by what happened before it.
When the contacts that took place in Tehran on Sept. 29, Rezaei’s previous statements, Azerbaijan’s sensitivities regarding regional security, and the discussions over way of life that followed immediately afterward are considered together, it becomes possible to offer a different reading of why the Oct. 2 speech was framed in such a strong tone.
This does not mean that the remarks were directed at a particular party. That is precisely the nature of diplomatic messages: Sometimes no name is mentioned, yet the political chronology speaks for itself.
*Leman Abdulla is a Baku-based journalist.
