Why Turkey and Azerbaijan Are Falling Out |
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the European Political Community summit in Prague on October 6, 2022. The two nations have long been close allies, but Turkey is growing frustrated with Azerbaijan’s strong ties with Israel and its behavior in Armenia. (Shutterstock/Alexandros Michailidis)
Why Turkey and Azerbaijan Are Falling Out
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Once viewed as inseparable, Baku and Ankara are increasingly at odds over their respective ties with Armenia and Israel.
For decades, the slogan “one nation, two states” has defined Turkish-Azerbaijani relations. It evoked ethnic brotherhood, energy interdependence, and a military alliance—most recently during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. But beneath the pan-Turkic rhetoric, fault lines are emerging over the issues of Armenian normalization, Israel, and Iran.
The latest flashpoint: Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Ankara recently declared that the Turkey-Armenia border will open after Armenia’s June elections, once constitutional amendments are made. It’s Baku’s long-standing demand that Armenia amend its constitution to expunge any lingering claims to Nagorno-Karabakh. If the party of the incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wins the elections, it is expected to move forward by putting those changes to the referendum.
What’s striking here is a foreign ambassador publicly announcing the timeline and conditions for Turkey’s sovereign border policy. This demand illustrates the trend identified by the Washington-based Middle East Institute’s Gonul Tol. Over the past year, Turkish diplomats increasingly complained about how “difficult” Azerbaijan has become—particularly when Baku tries to dictate terms to Ankara.
The ambassador’s public statement takes matters to a new level. As the former diplomat Fatih Ceylan noted, “in a period when official Ankara is carefully avoiding statements targeting Baku over Azerbaijan’s strategic military ties with Israel, the Azerbaijani ambassador’s........